The name of king was nothing more than a favor granted by the Romans; it was not a title of succession. Soon after Herod's death, Judæa was governed as a subordinate Roman province, by the proconsul of Syria, although from time to time the title of king was granted, sometimes to one Jew, sometimes to another, for a considerable sum of money, as under the emperor Claudius, when it was granted to the Jew Agrippa.
A daughter of Agrippa was that Berenice, celebrated for having been beloved by one of the best emperors Rome can boast. She it was who, by the injustice she experienced from her countrymen, drew down the vengeance of the Romans upon Jerusalem. She asked for justice, and the factions of the town refused it. The seditious spirit of the people impelled them to fresh excesses. Their character at all times was to be cruel; and their fate, to be punished.
This memorable siege, which ended in the destruction of the city, was carried on by Vespasian and Titus. The exaggerating Josephus pretends that in this short war more than a million of Jews were slaughtered. It is not to be wondered at that an author who puts fifteen thousand men in each village should slay a million. What remained were exposed in the public markets; and each Jew was sold at about the same price as the unclean animal of which they dare not eat.
In this last dispersion they again hoped for a deliverer; and under Adrian, whom they curse in their prayers, there arose one Barcochebas, who called himself a second Moses – a Shiloh – a Christ. Having assembled many of these wretched people under his banners, which they believed to be sacred, he perished with all his followers. It was the last struggle of this nation, which has never lifted its head again. Its constant opinion, that barrenness is a reproach, has preserved it; the Jews have ever considered as their two first duties, to get money and children.
From this short summary it results that the Hebrews have ever been vagrants, or robbers, or slaves, or seditious. They are still vagabonds upon the earth, and abhorred by men, yet affirming that heaven and earth and all mankind were created for them alone.
It is evident, from the situation of Judæa, and the genius of this people, that they could not but be continually subjugated. It was surrounded by powerful and warlike nations, for which it had an aversion; so that it could neither be in alliance with them, nor protected by them. It was impossible for it to maintain itself by its marine; for it soon lost the port which in Solomon's time it had on the Red Sea; and Solomon himself always employed Tyrians to build and to steer his vessels, as well as to erect his palace and his temple. It is then manifest that the Hebrews had neither trade nor manufactures, and that they could not compose a flourishing people. They never had an army always ready for the field, like the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Syrians, and the Romans. The laborers and artisans took up arms only as occasion required, and consequently could not form well-disciplined troops. Their mountains, or rather their rocks, are neither high enough, nor sufficiently contiguous, to have afforded an effectual barrier against invasion. The most numerous part of the nation, transported to Babylon, Persia, and to India, or settled in Alexandria, were too much occupied with their traffic and their brokerage to think of war. Their civil government, sometimes republican, sometimes pontifical, sometimes monarchial, and very often reduced to anarchy, seems to have been no better than their military discipline.
You ask, what was the philosophy of the Hebrews? The answer will be a very short one – they had none. Their legislator himself does not anywhere speak expressly of the immortality of the soul, nor of the rewards of another life. Josephus and Philo believe the soul to be material; their doctors admitted corporeal angels; and when they sojourned at Babylon, they gave to these angels the names given them by the Chaldæans – Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel. The name of Satan is Babylonian, and is in somewise the Arimanes of Zoroaster. The name of Asmodeus also is Chaldæan; and Tobit, who lived in Nineveh, is the first who employed it. The dogma of the immortality of the soul was developed only in the course of ages, and among the Pharisees. The Sadducees always denied this spirituality, this immortality, and the existence of the angels. Nevertheless, the Sadducees communicated uninterruptedly with the Pharisees, and had even sovereign pontiffs of their own sect. The prodigious difference in opinion between these two great bodies did not cause any disturbance. The Jews, in the latter times of their sojourn at Jerusalem, were scrupulously attached to nothing but the ceremonials of their law. The man who had eaten pudding or rabbit would have been stoned; while he who denied the immortality of the soul might be high-priest.
It is commonly said that the abhorrence in which the Jews held other nations proceeded from their horror of idolatry; but it is much more likely that the manner in which they at the first exterminated some of the tribes of Canaan, and the hatred which the neighboring nations conceived for them, were the cause of this invincible aversion. As they knew no nations but their neighbors, they thought that in abhorring them they detested the whole earth, and thus accustomed themselves to be the enemies of all men.
One proof that this hatred was not caused by the idolatry of the nations is that we find in the history of the Jews that they were very often idolaters. Solomon himself sacrificed to strange gods. After him, we find scarcely any king in the little province of Judah that does not permit the worship of these gods and offer them incense. The province of Israel kept its two calves and its sacred groves, or adored other divinities.
This idolatry, with which so many nations are reproached, is a subject on which but little light has been thrown. Perhaps it would not be difficult to efface this stain upon the theology of the ancients. All polished nations had the knowledge of a supreme God, the master of the inferior gods and of men. The Egyptians themselves recognized a first principle, which they called Knef, and to which all beside was subordinate. The ancient Persians adored the good principle, named Orosmanes; and were very far from sacrificing to the bad principle, Arimanes, whom they regarded nearly as we regard the devil. Even to this day, the Guebers have retained the sacred dogma of the unity of God. The ancient Brahmins acknowledged one only Supreme Being; the Chinese associated no inferior being with the Divinity, nor had any idol until the times when the populace were Jed astray by the worship of Fo, and the superstitions of the bonzes. The Greeks and the Romans, notwithstanding the multitude of their gods, acknowledged in Jupiter the absolute sovereign of heaven and earth. Homer, himself in the most absurd poetical fictions, has never lost sight of this truth. He constantly represents Jupiter as the only Almighty, sending good and evil upon earth, and, with a motion of his brow, striking gods and men with awe. Altars were raised, and sacrifices offered to inferior gods, dependent on the one supreme. There is not a single monument of antiquity in which the title of sovereign of heaven is given to any secondary deity – to Mercury, to Apollo, to Mars. The thunderbolt was ever the attribute of the master of all, and of him only.
The idea of a sovereign being, of his providence, of his eternal decrees, is to be found among all philosophers and all poets. In short, it is perhaps as unjust to think that the ancients equalled the heroes, the genii, the inferior gods, to him whom they called "the father and master of the gods," as it would be ridiculous to imagine that we associate with God the blessed and the angels.
You then ask whether the ancient philosophers and law-givers borrowed from the Jews, or the Jews from them? We must refer the question to Philo; he owns that before the translation of the Septuagint the books of his nation were unknown to strangers. A great people cannot have received their laws and their knowledge from a little people, obscure and enslaved. In the time of Osias, indeed, the Jews had no books; in his reign was accidentally found the only copy of the law then in existence. This people, after their captivity at Babylon, had no other alphabet than the Chaldæan; they were not famed for any art, any manufacture whatsoever; and even in the time of Solomon they were obliged to pay dear for foreign artisans. To say that the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, were instructed by the Jews, were to say that the Romans learned the arts from the people of Brittany. The Jews never were natural philosophers, nor geometricians, nor astronomers. So far were they from having public schools for the instruction of youth, that they had not even a term in their language to express such an institution. The people of Peru and Mexico measured their year much better than the Jews. Their stay in Babylon and in Alexandria, during which individuals might instruct themselves, formed the people to no art save that of usury. They never knew how to stamp money; and when Antiochus Sidetes permitted them to have a coinage of their own, they were almost incapable of profiting by this permission for four or five years; indeed, this coin is said to have been struck at Samaria. Hence, it is, that Jewish medals are so rare, and nearly all false. In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.
SECTION II
The Jewish Law
Their law must appear, to every polished people, as singular as their conduct; if it were not divine, it would seem to be the law of savages beginning to assemble themselves into a nation; and being divine, one cannot understand how it is that it has not existed from all ages, for them, and for all men.
But it is more strange than all that the immortality of the soul is not even intimated in this law, entitled "Vaicrah and Addebarim," Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
In this law it is forbidden to eat eels, because they have no scales; and hares, because they chew the cud, and have cloven feet. Apparently, the Jews had hares different from ours. The griffin is unclean, and four-footed birds are unclean, which animals are somewhat rare. Whoever touches a mouse, or a mole is unclean. The women are forbidden to lie with horses or asses. The Jewish women must have been subject to this sort of gallantry. The men are forbidden to offer up their seed to Moloch; and here the term seed is not metaphorical. It seems that it was customary, in the deserts of Arabia, to offer up this singular present to the gods; as it is said to be usual in Cochin and some other countries of India, for the girls to yield their virginity to an iron Priapus in a temple. These two ceremonies prove that mankind is capable of everything. The Kaffirs, who deprive themselves of one testicle, are a still more ridiculous example of the extravagance of superstition.
Another law of the Jews, equally strange, is their proof of adultery. A woman accused by her husband must be presented to the priests, and she is made to drink of the waters of jealousy, mixed with worm-wood and dust. If she is innocent, the water makes her more beautiful; if she is guilty, her eyes start from her head, her belly swells, and she bursts before the Lord.
We shall not here enter into the details of all these sacrifices, which were nothing more than the operations of ceremonial butchers; but it of great importance to remark another kind of sacrifice too common in those barbarous times. It is expressly ordered, in the twenty-seventh chapter of Leviticus, that all men, vowed in anathema to the Lord, be immolated; they "shall surely be put to death"; such are the words of the text. Here is the origin of the story of Jephthah, whether his daughter was really immolated, or the story was copied from that of Iphigenia. Here, too, is the source of the vow made by Saul, who would have immolated his son, but that the army, less superstitious than himself, saved the innocent young man's life.
It is then but too true that the Jews, according to their law, sacrificed human victims. This act of religion is in accordance with their manners; their own books represent them as slaughtering without mercy all that came in their way, reserving only the virgins for their use.
It would be very difficult – and should be very unimportant – to know at what time these laws were digested into the form in which we now have them. That they are of very high antiquity is enough to inform us how gross and ferocious the manners of that antiquity were.
SECTION III
The Dispersion of the Jews
It has been pretended that the dispersion of this people had been foretold, as a punishment for their refusing to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Messiah; the asserters affecting to forget that they had been dispersed throughout the known world long before Jesus Christ. The books that are left us of this singular nation make no mention of a return of the twelve tribes transported beyond the Euphrates by Tiglath-Pileser and his successor Shalmaneser; and it was six hundred years after, that Cyrus sent back to Jerusalem the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, which Nebuchodonosor had brought away into the provinces of his empire. The Acts of the Apostles certify that fifty-three days after the death of Jesus Christ, there were Jews from every nation under heaven assembled for the feast of Pentecost. St. James writes to the twelve dispersed tribes; and Josephus and Philo speak of the Jews as very numerous throughout the East.
It is true that, considering the carnage that was made of them under some of the Roman emperors, and the slaughter of them so often repeated in every Christian state, one is astonished that this people not only still exists, but is at this day no less numerous than it was formerly. Their numbers must be attributed to their exemption from bearing arms, their ardor for marriage, their custom of contracting it in their families early, their law of divorce, their sober and regular way of life, their abstinence, their toil, and their exercise.
Their firm attachment to the Mosaic law is no less remarkable, especially when we consider their frequent apostasies when they lived under the government of their kings and their judges; and Judaism is now, of all the religions in the world, the one most rarely abjured – which is partly the fruit of the persecutions it has suffered. Its followers, perpetual martyrs to their creed, have regarded themselves with progressively increasing confidence, as the fountain of all sanctity; looking upon us as no other than rebellious Jews, who have abjured the law of God, and put to death or torture those who received it from His hand.
Indeed, if while Jerusalem and its temple existed, the Jews were sometimes driven from their country by the vicissitudes of empires, they have still more frequently been expelled through a blind zeal from every country in which they have dwelt since the progress of Christianity and Mahometanism. They themselves compare their religion to a mother, upon whom her two daughters, the Christian and the Mahometan, have inflicted a thousand wounds. But, how ill soever she has been treated by them, she still glories in having given them birth. She makes use of them both to embrace the whole world, while her own venerable age embraces all time.
It is singular that the Christians pretend to have accomplished the prophecies by tyrannizing over the Jews, by whom they were transmitted. We have already seen how the Inquisition banished the Jews from Spain. Obliged to wander from land to land, from sea to sea, to gain a livelihood; everywhere declared incapable of possessing any landed property, or holding any office, they have been obliged to disperse, and roam from place to place, unable to establish themselves permanently in any country, for want of support, of power to maintain their ground, and of knowledge in the art of war. Trade, a profession long despised by most of the nations of Europe, was, in those barbarous ages, their only resource; and as they necessarily grew rich by it, they were treated as infamous usurers. Kings who could not ransack the purses of their subjects, put the Jews, whom they regarded not as citizens, to torture.
What was done to them in England may give some idea of what they experienced in other countries. King John, being in want of money, had the rich Jews in his kingdom imprisoned. One of them, having had seven of his teeth drawn one after another, to obtain his property, gave, on losing the eighth, a thousand marks of silver. Henry III. extorted from Aaron, a Jew of York, fourteen thousand marks of silver, and ten thousand for his queen. He sold the rest of the Jews of his country to his brother Richard, for the term of one year, in order, says Matthew Paris, that this count might disembowel those whom his brother had flayed.
In France they were put in prison, plundered, sold, accused of magic, of sacrificing children, of poisoning the fountains. They were driven out of the kingdom; they were suffered to return for money; and even while they were tolerated, they were distinguished from the rest of the inhabitants by marks of infamy. And, by an inconceivable whimsicality, while in other countries the Jews were burned to make them embrace Christianity, in France the property of such as became Christians was confiscated. Charles IV., by an edict given at Basville, April 4, 1392, abrogated this tyrannical custom, which, according to the Benedictine Mabillon, had been introduced for two reasons:
First, to try the faith of these new converts, as it was but too common for those of this nation to feign submission to the gospel for some personal interest, without internally changing their belief.
Secondly, because as they had derived their wealth chiefly from usury, the purity of Christian morals appeared to require them to make a general restitution, which was effected by confiscation.
But the true reason of this custom, which the author of the "Spirit of Laws" has so well developed, was a sort of "droit d'amortissement" – a redemption for the sovereign, or the seigneurs, of the taxes which they levied on the Jews, as mortmainable serfs, whom they succeeded; for they were deprived of this benefit when the latter were converted to the Christian faith.
At length, being incessantly proscribed in every country, they ingeniously found the means of saving their fortunes and making their retreats forever secure. Being driven from France under Philip the Long, in 1318, they took refuge in Lombardy; there they gave to the merchants bills of exchange on those to whom they had entrusted their effects at their departure, and these were discharged.
The admirable invention of bills of exchange sprang from the extremity of despair; and then, and not until then, commerce was enabled to elude the efforts of violence, and to maintain itself throughout the world.
SECTION IV
In Answer to Some Objections
Letters to Joseph, Ben, Jonathan, Aaron, Mathatai, and David Wincker.
FIRST LETTER.
Gentlemen: When, forty-four years ago, your countryman Medina became a bankrupt in London, being twenty thousand francs in my debt, he told me that "it was not his fault; that he was unfortunate"; that "he had never been one of the children of Belial"; that "he had always endeavored to live as a son of God" – that is, as an honest man, a good Israelite. I was affected; I embraced him; we joined in the praise of God; and I lost eighty per cent.
You ought to know that I never hated your nation; I hate no one; not even Fréron.
Far from hating, I have always pitied you. If, like my protector, good Pope Lambertini, I have sometimes bantered a little, I am not therefore the less sensitive. I wept, at the age of sixteen, when I was told that a mother and her daughter had been burned at Lisbon for having eaten, standing, a little lamb, cooked with lettuce, on the fourteenth day of the red moon; and I can assure you that the extreme beauty that this girl was reported to have possessed, had no share in calling forth my tears, although it must have increased the spectators' horror for the assassins, and their pity for the victim.
I know not how it entered my head to write an epic poem at the age of twenty. (Do you know what an epic poem is? For my part I knew nothing of the matter.) The legislator Montesquieu had not yet written his "Persian Letters," which you reproach me with having commented on; but I had already of myself said, speaking of a monster well known to your ancestors, and which even now is not without devotees:
Il vient; le fanatisme est son horrible nom;
Enfant dénaturé de la religion;
Armé pour la défendre, il cherche à la détruire,
Et reçu dans son sein, l'embrasse et le déchire,
C'est lui qui dans Raba, sur les bords de l'Arnon
Guidait les descendans du malheureux Ammon,
Quand à Moloch leur dieu des mères gémissantes
Offraient de leurs enfans les entrailles fumantes.
Il dicta de Jephté le serment inhumain;
Dans le cœur de sa fille il conduisait sa main.
C'est lui qui, de Calchas ouvrant la bouche impie
Demanda par sa voix la mort d'Iphigénie.
France, dans tes forêts il habita long-temps,
À l'affreux Tentatès il offrit ton encens.
Tu n'a point oublié ces sacres homicides,
Qu' à tes indignes dieux présentaient tes druides.
Du haut du capitole il criait aux Païens.
"Frappez, exterminez, déchirez les chrétiens."
Mais lorsqu'au fils de Dieu Rome enfin, fut soumise,
Du capitole en cendre il passa dans l'Eglise;
Et dans les cœurs chrétiens inspirant ses fureurs,
De martyrs qu'ils étaient les fit persécuteurs.
Dans Londres il a formé la secte turbulente
Qui sur un roi trop faible a mis sa main sanglante;
Dans Madrid, dans Lisbonne, il allume ces feux,
Ces buchers solennels où des Juifs malheureux
Sont tous les ans en pompe envoyés par des prêtres,
Pour n'avoir point quitté la foi de leurs ancêtres.
He comes; the fiend Fanaticism comes —
Religion's horrid and unnatural child —
Armed to defend her, arming to destroy —
Tearing her bosom in his feigned embrace.
'Twas he who guided Amnion's wretched race
On Anion's banks, where mothers offered up
Their children's mangled limbs on Moloch's altars.
'Twas he who prompted Jephthah's barbarous oath,
And aimed the poniard at his daughter's heart.
'Twas he who spoke, when Calchas' impious tongue
Called for the blameless Iphigenia's death.
France, he long revelled in thy forest shades,
Offering thy incense to the grim Tentâtes,
Whetting the savage Druid's murderous knife
To sate his worthless gods with human gore.
He, from the Capitol, stirred Pagan hearts
To exterminate Christ's followers; and he,
When Rome herself had bowed to Christian truth,
Quitted the Capitol to rule the church —
To reign supreme in every Christian soul,
And make the Pagans martyrs in their turn.
His were in England the fierce sect who laid
Their bloody hands on a too feeble king.
His are Madrid's and Lisbon's horrid fires,
The yearly portion of unhappy Jews,
By priestly judges doomed to temporal flames
For thinking their forefathers' faith the best.
You clearly see, then, that even so long ago I was your servant, your friend, your brother; although my father and mother had preserved to me my fore-skin.
I am aware that virility, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, has caused very fatal quarrels. I know what it cost Priam's son Paris, and Agamemnon's brother Menelaus. I have read enough of your books to know that Hamor's son Sichem ravished Leah's daughter Dinah, who at most was not more than five years old, but was very forward for her age. He wanted to make her his wife; and Jacob's sons, brothers of the violated damsel, gave her to him in marriage on condition that he and all his people should be circumcised. When the operation was performed, and all the Sichemites, or Sechemites, were lying-in of the pains consequent thereupon, the holy patriarchs Simeon and Levi cut all their throats one after another. But, after all, I do not believe that uncircumcision ought now to produce such abominable horrors; and especially I do not think that men should hate, detest, anathematize, and damn one another every Saturday and Sunday, on account of a morsel more or less of flesh.
If I have said that some of the circumcised have clipped money at Metz, at Frankfort on the Oder, and at Warsaw (which I do not remember) I ask their pardon; for, being almost at the end of my pilgrimage, I have no wish to embroil myself with Israel.
I have the honor to be (as they say),
Yours, etc.
SECOND LETTER.
Antiquity of the Jews.
Gentlemen: I have ever agreed, having read a few historical books for amusement, that you are a very ancient people, and your origin may be dated much farther back than that of the Teutones, the Celts, the Slavonians, the Angles, and Hurons. I see you assembling as a people in a capital called, sometimes Hershalaïm, sometimes Shaheb, on the hill Moriah, and on the hill Sion, near a desert, on a stony soil, by a small torrent which is dry six months of the year.
When you began to-establish yourselves in your corner, I will not say of land, but of pebbles, Troy had been destroyed by the Greeks about two centuries.
Medon was archon of Athens. Echestratus was reigning in Lacedæmon. Latinus Sylvius was reigning in Latium; and Osochor in Egypt. The Indies had been flourishing for a long succession of ages.
This was the most illustrious period of Chinese history. The emperor Tchin-wang was reigning with glory over that vast empire; all the sciences were there cultivated; and the public annals inform us that the king of Cochin China, being come to pay his respects to this emperor, Tchin-wang, received from him a present of a mariner's compass. This compass might have been of great service to your Solomon, for his fleets that went to the fine country of Ophir, which no one has ever known anything about.
Thus, after the Chaldæans, the Syrians, the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Chinese, the Latins, and the Etruscans, you are the first people upon earth who had any known form of government.
The Banians, the Guebers, and yourselves, are the only nations which, dispersed out of their own country, have preserved their ancient rites; if I make no account of the little Egyptian troops, called Zingari in Italy, Gypsies in England, and Bohemians in France, which had preserved the antique ceremonies of the worship of Isis, the sistrum, the cymbals, the dance of Isis, the prophesying, and the art of robbing hen-roosts.
These sacred troops are beginning to disappear from the face of the earth; while their pyramids still belong to the Turks, who perhaps will not always be masters of them – the figure of all things on this earth doth so pass away.
You say, that you have been settled in Spain ever since the days of Solomon: I believe it, and will even venture to think that the Phœnicians might have carried some Jews thither long before, when you were slaves in Phœnicia, after the horrid massacres which you say were committed by the robber Joshua, and by that other robber Caleb.
Your books indeed say, that you were reduced to slavery under Chushan-Rashataim, king of Mesopotamia, for eight years; under Eglon, king of Moab, for eighteen years; then under Jabin, king of Canaan, for twenty years; then in the little canton of Midian, from which you had issued, and where you dwelt in caverns, for seven years; then in Gilead, for eighteen years – notwithstanding that Jair, your prince, had thirty sons, each mounted on a fine ass – then under the Phœnicians (called by you Philistines), for forty years – until at last the Lord Adonai sent Samson, who tied three hundred foxes, one to another by the tails, and slew a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass, from which issued a fountain of clear water; which has been very well represented at the Comédie Italienne.
Here are, by your own confession, ninety-six years of captivity in the land of promise. Now it is very probable that the Syrians, who were the factors for all nations, and navigated as far as the great ocean, bought some Jewish slaves, and took them to Cadiz, which they founded. You see that you are much more ancient than you think. It is indeed very likely that you inhabited Spain several centuries before the Romans, the Goths, the Vandals, and the Moors.
I am not only your friend, your brother, but moreover your genealogist. I beg, gentlemen, that you will have the goodness to believe, that I never have believed, I do not believe, and I never will believe, that you are descended from those highway robbers whose ears and noses were cut off by order of King Actisanes, and whom, according to Diodorus of Sicily, he sent into the desert between Lake Sirbo and Mount Sinai – a frightful desert where water and every other necessary of life are wanting. They made nets to catch quails, which fed them for a few weeks, during the passage of the birds.
Some of the learned have pretended that this origin perfectly agrees with your history. You yourselves say, that you inhabited this desert, that there you wanted water, and lived on quails, which in reality abound there. Your accounts appear in the main to confirm that of Diodorus; but I believe only the Pentateuch. The author does not say that you had your ears and noses cut off. As far as I remember, (for I have not Diodorus at hand), you lost only your noses. I do not now recollect where I read that your ears were of the party; it might be in some fragments of Manetho, cited by St. Ephraem.
In vain does the secretary, who has done me the honor of writing to me in your name, assure me that you stole to the amount of upwards of nine millions in gold, coined or carved, to go and set up your tabernacle in the desert. I maintain, that you carried off nothing but what lawfully belonged to you, reckoning interest at forty per cent., which was the lawful rate.