17 - Europe’s Debt to Jewish People

Ancient “people of the Book” paid dearly for its diversity and influences

The Jews are “the people of the Book”, a name that was given them in ancient times. This expression is unavoidably associated with the image of an old rabbi immersed in the reading of monumental tomes.
Actually, “people of the Book” mostly refers to the Jewish acquaintance with reading and writing. Among them, illiteracy rates have always been extremely low.
Love for methodical, systematic studies, carried out in depth on sacred as well as profane subjects, in every field of knowledge, is one of the clearest traces of Jewish influence on Europe. There are others, just as important, beginning with the sense of God’s law, independent from any secular power. Jews affirm every day, in every action, the primacy of the Creator on the Creation, but their attitude is not passive because their faith establishes an exclusive relationship with the Creator, which gave them strength to stand up after every fall. Jews always stood up: their history, a history of persecution, massacres and a 2000-year long diaspora, is there to prove it. Europe owes much to these people; they taught never to give up.
The God of the Jews is listening. For them, faith consists in the belief that their prayer will reach Him. “This belief gives us hope,” says Elio Toaff, for years Rome’s chief rabbi. There isn’t faith alone, though: the people, the land of Israel and tradition are other values that form part of the Jewish identity. Therefore, we should talk of a Jewish civilization that left unique, deep traces in Europe. Just think of the idea of ‘people’, which Jews see as not just the inhabitants of the land or the members of the original community, but also as those living outside of them, all over the world. This concept has had an enormous influence, even recently, on the strategies devised by several states towards those citizens who were forced to go away: yesterday they were “emigrants”, today they are “citizens abroad”. This is no small difference.
The idea of the “chosen people” (as the Jews call themselves) has also had great influence on Europe’s culture. It doesn’t mean that the Jews believe themselves to be better than everyone else, but that they are the people chosen by God as consignee of His law. Rabbi Toaff continues, “Jews were monotheists, i.e. they believed in one God. Polytheistic peoples could not achieve so much.” He concludes, “I think that the Jewish people managed to diffuse monotheism in the world. We did it together with Christianity and Islam, but we were those who first beat the path.”
This awareness of being the first to beat this path became a part of European culture, pride for what has been built with boldness, vindication of diversity. Without going too far back in history, it will suffice to remember the fortitude displayed by Italian and French Communists in asserting their “European way to Socialism” when straying from Moscow’s totalitarian orthodoxy entailed heavy reactions. In even closer times, the same attitude can be found in those European governments that distanced themselves from the US intervention in Iraq; the same attitude underpinned the hostility, occasionally becoming open revolt, that Eastern Europe felt towards the Soviet Union for 40 years. Other examples could be made, all of them traceable back to the culture of a people that paid dearly for its diversity, but left it in the chromosomes of Europeans, a mark that explains history as well as everyday occurrence. The Jews gave Europe much more than they received.
Then there is the entrepreneurial spirit of the Jews, which originated Europe’s protocapitalism. Protestant states allowed them to establish credit institutes for their mutual support; Catholic states hindered them, declaring that those institutions were a front for Church-condemned usurary practices. However, those same Catholic states said nothing when the Franciscans invented the pawn banks, which institutionally made a profit on other people’s needs. However, relations between Christians and Jews is another story.
The kind of capitalism that the Jews applied in Europe in the Middle Ages wasn’t crude. For instance, their letters of credit, anticipating the modern credit card, soon became a precious tool of trade. Such a document, issued by a Jewish banker of the source city and addressed to a Jewish banker in the destination city, allowed merchants to obtain cash when they most needed it, enabling them to travel without money on them that might attract robbers and highwaymen.
Finally, there is self-irony, a sophisticated intellectual exercise that requires great freedom of thought and an awareness of one’s defect. Nobody knows how to make fun of themselves as Jews do. There are dozens of books written from this standpoint; in this field the Jews had a strong influence on a rather humourless Europe. Self-effacing irony was the smiling alternative to the gloomy Germanic austerity brought by the populations that occupied the fallen Roman empire.
For instance, here’s how the Jews joke on their own proverbial attachment to money. A child asks his father, “What is ethics, Dad?” “I’ll answer with an example, son,” says Dad. “Let’s say a customer comes into my partner Abraham’s and my store; he buys goods worth 60 guilders and pays with a 100-guilder note. Suddenly, I notice that he’s forgotten about his change. That’s where ethics kicks in: should I keep the 40 guilders, or should I share them with Abraham?”
This is how they deal with another defect, avarice. A wife, after much insistence, manages to convince her husband to go to a tailor and have a new suit made for him. When the man goes to pick the suit up, he asks, “Did you put the black armband?” “I’m sorry, Sir; I did not,” replies the tailor. “I wasn’t aware that you had suffered a loss.” “My loss comes now, when I have to pay for this suit.”
Another defect the Jews joke on is slovenliness. A father and son go to a Turkish bath together. “Shame on you, son, your feet are dirty,” says the father. “But Dad, yours are even dirtier.”. “How can you compare?” replies the father. “I’m 30 years older than you!”
The history of the Jews began 4,000 years ago, when God ordered Abraham, who lived in Ur in lower Mesopothamia (today’s Iraq), to go to “the land of Canaan” (Palestine). Abraham was the first who conceived the idea of the existence of one God, and for this reason God established a covenant with him. “I’ll turn your descendants into a great nation, I’ll bless you and make your name glorious. My covenant is an eternal pact between me and you and the generations that will come after you,” says the Bible. Monotheism began with Abraham, and therefore he’s recognized by all three major monotheistic religions: Hebraism, Christianity and Islam.
Abraham arrived in Palestine and conceived two sons: Isaac and Ishmael. Isaac fathered Jacob: his 12 sons would give rise to the 12 tribes of Israel.
Abraham’s descendants stayed in Palestine and populated it. Suddenly — some say due to a famine — they were forced to flee to Egypt, where they soon climbed the social ladder, with a Jew, Joseph, eventually becoming a viceroy. In Egypt, however, began the misfortunes of the Jews: their enterprising spirit and the position they had achieved raised envy and jealousy, and they were persecuted. They escaped back to Palestine, under the leadership of Moses, who received the Tablets of the Law upon Mount Sinai. With that, God renewed the covenant originally given to Abraham. The Tablets would remain the centre of Jewish spiritual life.
It took the Jews 40 years to return to Palestine. There, they spent the following four centuries without kings, being ruled by seniors and led in war by other charismatic leaders known as ‘sofetim’ (judges). Finally, similarly to other peoples, they decided to go to a monarchic structure. Samuel (judge, prophet and priest) consecrated the first two kings of Israel: David and Saul. This happened some 1,000 years b.C.E.
Saul’s coronation marked the passage from the 123 tribes to a people sharing some common political traits. The reign of King David was distinguished by the conquest of Jerusalem, the city that became an irreplaceable religious centre from the whole Jewish tradition. Salomon, successor to David, built the first great Temple in Jerusalem.
In 587 b.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar’s army conquered Israel, destroying the Temple and deporting the Jews to Babylon. This is the period of the so-called ‘captivity’, which lasted until 538 b.C.E., when the Persians toppled the Babylonian empire and the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return to Palestine, now a part of his empire, and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
By now, our readers will have understood that we are not writing the history of the Jews, but merely summarizing it in order to show how many trials these people suffered. Jumping forward a few more centuries, we can say that the Persian domination over Palestine ended in 332 b.C.E. when Alexander the Great occupied the area and brought it under the Hellenistic influence. After Alexander came the Egyptians and finally the Romans.
The Jews were hostile towards the Romans, because the latter, unlike other dominators, ruled Palestine with an iron fist. This bred numerous revolts, with the most violent exploding in 66 C.E. and being led by the Zealotes, a political-religious sect that had its raison d’etre in resisting the Roman occupation. Emperors Vespasian and Titus extracted terrible punishment: over 600,000 Jews died and tens of thousands were enslaved. Four years later, in 70 C.E., the Temple was once again razed. The only vestige remaining is the Wailing Wall, still a place of worship.
The Jews did not give up, though; in 132 they rebelled once more, and once more the rebellion was bloodily put down. This time Rome decided to teach the Jews a final lesson: they cancelled Palestine as a state and turned it into an imperial province called Judaea, renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, forbade the Jews to enter it under penalty of death, and repopulated it with pagans. That marked the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora (dispersion, dissemination) all over the world. The Temple was never rebuilt, neither in Jerusalem nor anywhere else: its role will be taken by the synagogues.
Driven from their land, the Jews headed in all directions, alternating brief periods of serenity and new persecutions. Despite those persecutions and discrimination, they always managed to stand up again, keeping their faith, traditions, and unity. Maybe this very talent for survival, together with their entrepreneurial skill and a separate life often seeming mysterious, was the reason for the myth of their difference. This myth, in turn, caused many sorrows for them: in the past there was a ‘zero-tolerance policy’ towards ‘different’ people.
Later, the Jews had to deal with religious hostility; from Christians and the Church, who accused them of killing the Son of God, and from Muslims, who acknowledged their common monotheistic roots but insisted in imposing their primacy. Theological disputes ended in bloodshed, as usual; and, as usual, the weaker party bled the most, and the Jews were not the stronger side.
By the end of the first millennium they had settled all over Europe, especially in Spain, where they took the name of Sephardim (“Sefarad” is the Hebrew word for Spain), and in Germany, where they took the name of Ashkenazim (“Ashkenaz” meaning German). Jewish communities existed everywhere in Europe, from Hungary to Poland, from Britain to Italy, from France to the Netherlands. They were gradually expelled, even though Christian rulers had welcomed them at first, protecting them and at the same time enjoying their role as sources of cash (princes, kings and emperors all borrowed money from Jewish moneylenders).
In 1096, in Germany, there were the first ‘pogroms’ (the word means ‘devastation’): people were massacred, synagogues torched, goods seized, survivors expelled. Those were isolated episodes, but they laid the foundations for European Anti-Semitism that saw the Jews not just as enemies of Christianity (the Jews were accused of profanating consecrated hosts and murdering children for their rituals), but also as enemies of society, because they refused any form of integration.
The accusations of profanity and murder were false; those of living as separate and stubbornly different were true. The Jews did nothing to be accepted because they maintained that their difference had divine origins. The 1096 pogroms were followed by more pogroms, for centuries.
Rather unusual, but just as bloody, pogroms were the Crusades. Called in order to retake the Holy Sepulchre from the Muslims, they did not spare the Jews, and when the Christian knights stormed Jerusalem in 1099 they massacred everybody, ‘explaining’ that they had to get rid of the ‘closer infidels’ (the Jews) before dealing with the ‘farther infidels’ (the Muslims).
England expelled the Jews in 1290, France in 1306. The arrival in Germany of the Black Death in 1348 triggered a new wave of pogroms: accused of voluntarily spreading the epidemics, the Jews were massacred everywhere. In Spain, where they had enjoyed a certain tolerance, they were compelled to convert to Christianity in 1492, with the Inquisition tasked with verifying that the ‘conversos’ did not continue ‘being Jews’ in secret. That was a failure: the ‘conversos’ did not give up on their Judaism, and the Inquisition could only put the few it uncovered to death. The problem was not solved, so the most Catholic sovereigns Isabel and Ferdinand, those who had footed Cristoforo Colombo’s bill, expelled them from Spain, with the added obligation to leave everything behind: they could only take the clothes they wore. Religious intolerance and economic blackmail often mix.
This new Diaspora created the ghettoes. The most tolerant cities that welcomed the Jews (especially in Italy: Venice, Ferrara, Rome, Ancona, Lecce, Urbino) set aside for them special neighbourhoods, walled and with gates that were closed at night. It was hypocritical, but it protected the rulers from accusations of favouring the Jews, while at the same time ensuring the Jews a degree of protection. Of course, it also guaranteed their political, civic and social isolation.
Only the new democratic ideals spread by the French Revolution allowed tolerance to return. Two apparently contradictory phenomena also occurred: the progressive assimilation of the Jews in the life of the countries where they lived, and the birth of Zionism, the political movement advocating the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Both phenomena have been accomplished: the State of Israel has existed since 1948, and the Jews are an active presence wherever they live.
Before these results were achieved, however, came the immense tragedy of the Shoah, the Holocaust enacted by Nazi barbarity: over six million Jews were exterminated during World War II. This is recent history, and an embarrassment for mankind that will be difficult to cancel. Just as difficult to eradicate is the occasional reappearance of anti-Semitism, reprising the dark themes of the pogroms of 10 centuries ago as well as those used by Adolf Hitler for his ‘final solution’. Some tiny but extremely dangerous minorities are still afraid of the Jews; their being different, despite 4,000 years of legitimate reasons, still haunts those who hate any non-conformity.
For this, too, the Jews are an integral part of Europe, where history brought about contradiction and incoherence, exalting victories and burning defeats. The Jews were a constant presence in this history. No group of people gave so much to countries that, after all, weren’t their own; and they did so just for asserting their right to exist. The greatest mystery of the Jews lies precisely in their survival despite exile, discrimination, even extermination. Europe owes much to the Jews.

17 – To Be Continued

Publication Date: 2004-09-19
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4422