by
arthur koestler
Two basic facts emerge from our survey: the disappearance of the Khazar
nation from its historic habitat, and the simultaneous appearance in adjacent
regions to the north-west of the greatest concentration of Jews since
the beginnings of the Diaspora. Since the two are obviously connected,
historians agree that immigration from Khazaria must have contributed
to the growth of Polish Jewry - a conclusion supported by the evidence
cited in the previous chapters. But they feel less certain about the extent
of this contribution - the size of the Khazar immigration compared with
the influx of Western Jews, and their respective share in the genetic
make-up of the modern Jewish community. .In other words, the fact that Khazars emigrated
in substantial numbers into Poland is established beyond dispute; the
question is whether they provided the bulk of the new settlement, or only
its hard core, as it were. To find an answer to this question, we must
get some idea of the size of the immigration of "real Jews"
from the West.
2
Towards the end of the first millennium, the most important settlements
of Western European Jews were in France and the Rhineland.*[Not counting
the Jews of Spain, who formed a category apart and did not participate
in the migratory movements with which we are concerned.] Some of these
communities had probably been founded in Roman days, for, between the
destruction of Jerusalem and the decline of the Roman Empire, Jews had
settled in many of the greater cities under its rule, and were later on
reinforced by immigrants from Italy and North Africa. Thus we have records
from the ninth century onwards of Jewish communities in places all over
France, from Normandy down to Provence and the Mediterranean. .One
group even crossed the Channel to England in the wake of the Norman invasion,
apparently invited by William the Conqueror,1 because he needed their
capital and enterprise. Their history has been summed up by Baron:
- They were subsequently converted into a class of "royal usurers"
whose main function was to provide credits for both political and economic
ventures. After accumulating great wealth through the high rate of interest,
these moneylenders were forced to disgorge it in one form or another
for the benefit of the royal treasury. The prolonged well-being of many
Jewish families, the splendour of their residence and attire, and their
influence on public affairs blinded even experienced observers to the
deep dangers lurking from the growing resentment of debtors of all classes,
and the exclusive dependence of Jews on the protection of their royal
masters.... Rumblings of discontent, culminating in violent outbreaks
in 1189-90, presaged the final tragedy: the expulsion of 1290. The meteoric
rise, and even more rapid decline of English Jewry in the brief span
of two and a quarter centuries (1066-1290) brought into sharp relief
the fundamental factors shaping the destinies of all western Jewries
in the crucial first half of the second millennium.2
The English example is instructive, because it is exceptionally well
documented compared to the early history of the Jewish communities on
the Continent. The main lesson we derive from it is that the social-economic
influence of the Jews was quite out of proportion with their small numbers.
There were, apparently, no more than 2500 Jews in England at any time
before their expulsion in 1290.*[According to the classic survey of Joseph
Jacobs, The Jews of Angevin England, based on recorded Jewish
family names and other documents. [Quoted by Baron, Vol. IV, p. 77.]]
This tiny Jewish community in mediaeval England played a leading part
in the country's economic Establishment - much more so than its opposite
number in Poland; yet in contrast to Poland it could not rely on a network
of Jewish small-towns to provide it with a mass-basis of humble craftsmen,
of lower-middle-class artisans and workmen, carters and innkeepers; it
had no roots in the people. On this vital issue, Angevin England epitomized
developments on the Western Continent. The Jews of France and Germany
faced the same predicament: their occupational stratification was lopsided
and top-heavy. This led everywhere to the same, tragic sequence of events.
The dreary tale always starts with a honeymoon, and ends in divorce and
bloodshed. In the beginning the Jews are pampered with special charters,
privileges, favours. They are personae gratae like the court
alchemists, because they alone have the secret of how to keep the wheels
of the economy turning. "In the 'dark ages'," wrote Cecil Roth,
"the commerce of Western Europe was largely in Jewish hands, not
excluding the slave trade, and in the Carolingian cartularies Jew and
Merchant are used as almost interchangeable terms."3 But with the
growth of a native mercantile class, they became gradually excluded not
only from most productive occupations, but also from the traditional forms
of commerce, and virtually the only field left open to them was lending
capital on interest. "...The floating wealth of the country was soaked
up by the Jews, who were periodically made to disgorge into the exchequer..."4
The archetype of Shylock was established long before Shakespeare's time.
.In the honeymoon days, Charlemagne
had sent a historic embassy in 797 to Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad to negotiate
a treaty of friendship; the embassy was composed of the Jew Isaac and
two Christian nobles. The bitter end came when, in 1306, Philip le Bel
expelled the Jews from the kingdom of France. Though later some were allowed
to return, they suffered further persecution, and by the end of the century
the French community of Jews was virtually extinct.*[ The modern community
of Jews in France and England was founded by refugees from the Spanish
Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.]
3
If we turn to the history of German Jewry, the first fact to note is
that "remarkably, we do not possess a comprehensive scholarly history
of German Jewry.... The Germanica Judaica is merely a good reference
work to historic sources shedding light on individual communities up to
1238."5 It is a dim light, but at least it illuminates the territorial
distribution of the Western-Jewish communities in Germany during the critical
period when Khazar-Jewish immigration into Poland was approaching its
peak. lOne of the earliest records of such a community in Germany mentions
a certain Kalonymous, who, in 906, emigrated with his kinsfolk from Lucca
in Italy to Mavence. About the same time we hear of Jews in Spires and
Worms, and somewhat later in other places - Trves, Metz, Strasbourg, Cologne
- all of them situated in a narrow strip in Alsace and along the Rhine
valley. The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (see above, II, 8) visited
the region in the middle of the twelfth century and wrote: "In these
cities there are many Israelites, wise men and rich."6 But how many
are "many"? In fact very few, as will be seen.
.Earlier on, there lived in Mayence a certain Rabbi Gershom ben
Yehuda (circa 960-1030) whose great learning earned him the title
"Light of the Diaspora" and the position of spiritual head of
the French and Rhenish-German community. At some date around 1020 Gershom
convened a Rabbinical Council in Worms, which issued various edicts, including
one that put a legal stop to polygamy (which had anyway been in abeyance
for a long time). To these edicts a codicil was added, which provided
that in case of urgency any regulation could be revoked "by an assembly
of a hundred delegates from the countries Burgundy, Normandy, France,
and the towns of Mayence, Spires and Worms". In other rabbinical
documents too, dating from the same period, only these three towns are
named, and we can only conclude that the other Jewish communities in the
Rhineland were at the beginning of the eleventh century still too insignificant
to be mentioned.7 By the end of the same century, the Jewish communities
of Germany narrowly escaped complete extermination in the outbursts of
mob-hysteria accompanying the First Crusade, AD 1096. F. Barker has conveyed
the crusader's mentality with a dramatic force rarely encountered in the
columns of the Encyclopaedia Britannica:8
- He might butcher all, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then
at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre
- for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord?
The Jews of the Rhineland were caught in that winepress, which nearly
squeezed them to death. Moreover, they themselves became affected by a
different type of mass hysteria: a morbid yearning for martyrdom. According
to the Hebrew chronicler Solomon bar Simon, considered as generally reliable,9
the Jews of Mayence, faced with the alternative between baptism or death
at the hands of the mob, gave the example to other communities by deciding
on collective suicide:10
- Imitating on a grand scale Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac,
fathers slaughtered their children and husbands their wives. These acts
of unspeakable horror and heroism were performed in the ritualistic
form of slaughter with sacrificial knives sharpened in accordance with
Jewish law. At times the leading sages of the community, supervising
the mass immolation, were the last to part with life at their own hands....
In the mass hysteria, sanctified by the glow of religious martyrdom
and compensated by the confident expectation of heavenly rewards, nothing
seemed to matter but to end life before one fell into the hands of the
implacable foes and had to face the inescapable alternative of death
at the enemy's hand or conversion to Christianity.
Turning from gore to sober statistics, we get a rough idea of the size
of the Jewish communities in Germany. The Hebrew sources agree on 800
victims (by slaughter or suicide) in Worms, and vary between 900 and 1300
for Mayence. Of course there must have been many who preferred baptism
to death, and the sources do not indicate the number of survivors; nor
can we be sure that they do not exaggerate the number of martyrs. At any
rate, Baron concludes from his calculations that "the total Jewish
population of either community had hardly exceeded the figures here given
for the dead alone".11 So the survivors in Worms or in Mayence could
only have numbered a few hundred in each case. Yet these two towns (with
Spires as a third) were the only ones important enough to be included
in Rabbi Gershom's edict earlier on. .Thus
we are made to realize that the Jewish community in the German Rhineland
was numerically small, even before the First Crusade, and had shrunk to
even smaller proportions after having gone through the winepress of the
Lord. Yet cast of the Rhine, in central and northern Germany, there were
as yet no Jewish communities at all, and none for a long time to come.
The traditional conception of Jewish historians that the Crusade of 1096
swept like a broom a mass-migration of German Jews into Poland is simply
a legend - or rather an ad hoc hypothesis invented because, as they knew
little of Khazar history, they could see no other way to account for the
emergence, out of nowhere, of this unprecedented concentration of Jews
in Eastern Europe. Yet there is not a single mention in the contemporary
sources of any migration, large or small, from the Rhineland further east
into Germany, not to mention distant Poland..Thus
Simon Dubnov, one of the historians of the older school: "The first
crusade which set the Christian masses in motion towards the Asiatic east,
drove at the same time the Jewish masses towards the cast of Europe."12
However, a few lines further down he has to admit: "About the circumstances
of this emigration movement which was so important to Jewish history we
possess no close information."13 Yet we do possess abundant information
of what these battered Jewish communities did during the first and subsequent
crusades. Some died by their own hands; others tried to offer resistance
and were lynched; while those who survived owed their good fortune to
the fact that they were given shelter for the duration of the emergency
in the fortified castle of the Bishop or Burgrave who, at least theoretically,
was responsible for their legal protection. Frequently this measure was
not enough to prevent a massacre; but the survivors, once the crusading
hordes had passed, invariably returned to their ransacked homes and synagogues
to make a fresh start. .We find this pattern repeatedly in chronicles:
in Treves, in Metz, and many other places. By the time of the second and
later crusades, it had become almost a routine: "At the beginning
of the agitation for a new crusade many Jews of Mayence, Worms, Spires,
Strasbourg, Wrzburg and other cities, escaped to neighbouring castles,
leaving their books and precious possessions in the custody of friendly
burghers."14 One of the main sources is the Book of Remembrance
by Ephraim bar Jacob, who himself, at the age of thirteen, had been among
the refugees from Cologne in the castle of Wolkenburg.15 Solomon bar Simon
reports that during the second crusade the survivors of the Mayence Jews
found protection in Spires, then returned to their native city and built
a new synagogue.16 This is the leitmotif of the Chronicles; to
repeat it once more, there is not a word about Jewish communities emigrating
toward eastern Germany, which, in the words of Mieses,17 was still Judenrein
- clean of Jews - and was to remain so for several centuries.
4
The thirteenth century was a period of partial recovery. We hear for
the first time of Jews in regions adjacent to the Rhineland: the Palatinate
(AD 1225); Freiburg (1230), Ulm (1243), Heidelberg (1255), etc.18 But
it was to be only a short respite, for the fourteenth century brought
new disasters to Franco-German Jewry. .The
first catastrophe was the expulsion of all Jews from the royal domains
of Philip le Bel. France had been suffering from an economic crisis, to
the usual accompaniments of debased currency and social unrest. Philip
tried to remedy it by the habitual method of soaking the Jews. He exacted
from them payments of 100000 livres in 1292, 215000 livres
in 1295, 1299, 1302 and 1305, then decided on a radical remedy for his
ailing finances. On June 21, 1306, he signed a secret order to arrest
all Jews in his kingdom on a given day, confiscate their property and
expel them from the country. The arrests were carried out on July 22,
and the expulsion a few weeks later. The refugees emigrated into regions
of France outside the King's domain: Provence, Burgundy, Aquitaine, and
a few other frudal fiefs. But, according to Mieses, "there are no
historical records whatsoever to indicate that German Jewry increased
its numbers through the sufferings of the Jewish community in France in
the decisive period of its destruction".19 And no historian has ever
suggested that French Jews trekked across Germany into Poland, either
on that occasion or at any other time. lUnder Philip's successors there
were some partial recalls of Jews (in 1315 and 1350), but they could not
undo the damage, nor prevent renewed outbursts of mob persecution. By
the end of the fourteenth century, France, like England, was virtually
Judenrein.
5
The second catastrophe of that disastrous century was the Black Death,
which, between 1348 and 1350, killed off a third of Europe's population,
and in some regions even two-thirds. It came from east Asia via Turkestan,
and the way it was let loose on Europe, and what it did there, is symbolic
of the lunacy of man. A Tartar leader named Janibeg in 1347 was besieging
the town of Kaffa (now Feodosia) in the Crimea, then a Genoese trading
port. The plague was rampant in Janibeg's army, so he catapulted the corpses
of infected victims into the town, whose population became infected in
its turn. Genoese ships carried the rats and their deadly fleas westward
into the Mediterranean ports, from where they spread inland..The
bacilli of Pasteurella pestis were not supposed to make a distinction
between the various denominations, yet Jews were nevertheless singled
out for special treatment. After being accused earlier on of the ritual
slaughter of Christian children, they were now accused of poisoning the
wells to spread the Black Death. The legend travelled faster even than
the rats, and the consequence was the burning of Jews en masse
all over Europe. Once more suicide by mutual self-immolation became a
common expedient, to avoid being burned alive. .The decimated population of Western Europe
did not reach again its pre-plague level until the sixteenth century.
As for its Jews, who had been exposed to the twofold attack of rats and
men. only a fraction survived. As Kutschera wrote:
- The populace avenged on them the cruel blows of destiny and set upon
those whom the plague had spared with fire and sword. When the epidemics
receded, Germany, according to contemporary historians, was left virtually
without Jews. We are led to conclude that in Germany itself the Jews
could not prosper, and were never able to establish large and populous
communities. How, then, in these circumstances, should they have been
able to lay the foundations in Poland of a mass population so dense
that at present [AD 1909] it outnumbers the Jews of Germany at the rate
of ten to one? It is indeed difficult to understand how the idea ever
gained ground that the eastern Jews represent immigrants from the West,
and especially from Germany.20
Yet, next to the first crusade, the Black Death is most frequently invoked
by historians as the deus ex machina which created Eastern Jewry. And,
just as in the case of the crusades, there is not a shred of evidence
for this imaginary exodus. On the contrary, the indications are that the
Jews' only hope of survival on this, as on that earlier occasions, was
to stick together and seek shelter in some fortified place or less hostile
surroundings in the vicinity. There is only one case of an emigration
in the Black Death period mentioned by Mieses: Jews from Spires took refuge
from persecution in Heidelberg - about ten miles away. .After
the virtual extermination of the old Jewish communities in France and
Germany in the wake of the Black Death, Western Europe remained Judenrein
for a couple of centuries, with only a few enclaves vegetating on - except
in Spain. It was an entirely different stock of Jews who founded the modern
communities of England, France and Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries - the Sephardim (Spanish Jews), forced to flee from Spain where
they had been resident for more than a millennium. Their history - and
the history of modern European Jewry - lies outside the scope of this
book. .We may safely conclude that the traditional
idea of a mass-exodus of Western Jewry from the Rhineland to Poland all
across Germany - a hostile, Jewless glacis - is historically untenable.
It is incompatible with the small size of the Rhenish Communities, their
reluctance to branch out from the Rhine valley towards the east, their
stereotyped behaviour in adversity, and the absence of references to migratory
movements in contemporary chronicles. Further evidence for this view is
provided by linguistics, to be discussed in Chapter VII.
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