1
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.