Chapter XVI

THE BREAK-UP OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE:
SOME OF ITS CONSEQUENCES.

=1. Political Changes.=――Theodosius, who died in 395, was the last of the Roman Emperors who held undivided sway over those vast dominions. After his death the ancient empire of Rome was split up into two great states, and styled the Empire of the East and the Empire of the West. The Northern barbarians found their opportunity in this division, and, in 410, and again in 455, great hordes of Goths and Vandals swooped down on beautiful, debased Rome, and plundered it. Within a century of the death of Theodosius the Roman Empire of the West had ceased to exist. The Emperors of the Eastern division――the Byzantine Emperors, as they were by-and-by called――fixed their court at Constantinople, and kept up their title and much of their power for over one thousand years――till the year 1453, in fact, when Constantinople was sacked by the Saracens. The general shifting of boundaries which ensued on the break-up of a great power like Rome brought about various changes in government, which are easier to recognise than changes in sentiment and circumstance. We will look at the political changes first, and the map will be a help to the understanding of them. The conquests of the barbarians resulted in new names and new masters to the old historic sites. Goths and Vandals, Lombards and Franks, rose on the ruins of the great Roman state. From the latter half of the fourth century to the end of the fifth there was general storm and upheaval throughout those dominions, in almost every province of which Jews were to be found. Not to speak for a moment of the Eastern division of the empire, there were Jews in Italy, in Greece, in the Archipelago, in such parts of Germany as were civilised, in Gaul, and in Spain. By the beginning of the sixth century, things had settled down a little, and we can see some order, and find some well-known names and landmarks. Justinian was at that date Emperor of the Eastern remains of the great Roman state; Recared, the first Christian king of the Goths, ruled in Spain; Chilperic, who has been called the Nero of France, was his contemporary; and towards the end of that same century Pope Gregory I. was the head of the Church.

=2. Social Changes.=――At this period of stress and storm, Jews were scattered in all the places where it was felt. But the legislation of the age forbade them to take the part of Roman citizens in the struggle. They were not regarded as Roman citizens either by Church council or by State code. In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. There were difficulties put in the way of their holding property, and difficulties in the way of their bequeathing it. By the time of Justinian (530‒560) the ‘must nots’ and the ‘shall nots,’ of which the Jews were the occasion, amounted to quite a considerable portion of the famous Roman code. This sort of legislation, and the warfare consequent on the break-up of the Roman Empire, together produced one very noteworthy effect. With the fall of Jerusalem the people of the Land became in a sense the people of the Book. With the fall of Rome they seem to gradually become, and for many centuries to remain, the people of the ledger. It was another and a narrower change, and one for which the Jews themselves must be held wholly free from blame. Cruel legislation turned a people with the strongest home instincts into an almost willing community of wanderers. It reduced men who, through generations, had loved to live by the work of their hands, to the necessity of living by the exercise of their wits. There was no leisure to train workers of the Bezaleel and Aholiab type into ‘skilfulness in all manner of cunning workmanship,’ for rough weapons were the chief demand of the age. There was no longer a chance for the old to sit, in peaceful sense of proprietorship, under their own vine and fig tree, whilst young tillers of the soil vigorously ‘gathered in their corn and their wine and their oil.’ The oliveyards and the vineyards and the corn-fields were often battle-fields, or sometimes pleasant adjuncts to the monasteries which were beginning to be built. In any case they were not for Jews, who might not be landowners, save in the sense that ‘six feet of English soil’ were offered in perpetuity by our English Harold to the invader.

=3. Monks and Saints.=――In the practical occupation of their lives, Jews and Christians were distinctly divided by legislation, and through religious sentiment they were drifting further and further apart. About this period, the end of the fifth century, the Church hero of the day was a certain Simon Stylites, afterwards canonised as saint, and added to that long roll of deified beings, to be prayed to and protected by, which was making the Christian heaven something of a heathen Olympus. Saint Simon Stylites’s claim to saintship and to hero-worship lay in the fact that he was living on the top of a pillar, and that ‘living’ meant to him not the common round of daily duties and daily cares, but a miserable and useless existence, persevered in from the purest motives. Saint Simon Stylites may serve as an extreme example of what was then, and for centuries after, the highest Christian ideal. There came to be a whole class of men called monks, and of women who were called nuns, who of their own free will gave up all the innocent pleasures and happinesses of life. They prayed, and fasted, and scourged themselves at regular intervals, and chose to live in bareness and discomfort, and often in actual dirt. They put peas in their shoes, and hair shirts on their backs; and the kindnesses they did――and they did many――were done from duty to God rather than from love of man. In the intervals of their set prayings and fastings they doctored the sick, but they seldom remembered that ‘a cheerful heart doeth good like a medicine.’ There was once a small sect among the Jews[7] who thought they could best serve God by selfishly withdrawing from the world in which He had placed them, who chose to suffer rather than to do, and who made an especial study and an especial care of their own souls. This sect, the Essenes, which was scanty and short-lived, was never in sympathy with the body of the Jewish nation. It was a system altogether repugnant to Jewish notions of what is pleasing to God. Cleanliness, in the Jewish code, is not even next to godliness, but is a detailed and indispensable part of it. Wilful dirt, and discomfort, and dismalness, are, all alike, considered immoral, and the whole teaching of the Bible is on the lines that ‘the servants of the Lord shall rejoice before Him,’ and ‘serve Him with gladness.’ The monks of Christianity were an exaggerated outcome of that outlived error, the Essenes of Judaism; and we can understand how the silent, cowled, and barefooted monks, and the multitude of the readily worshipped ‘saints,’ made the principles of Christianity distasteful to the Jew, in like manner as the persecuting, blundering populace rendered the practice of it disgraceful. More and more the Jews lived a distinct and separate life from the peoples among whom they dwelt, separated by religious thought as well as by so-called religious legislation.

=4. How Jews became Traders.=――Leisure and a sense of security are needed for any industrious or cultivated occupation. The irruption of the barbarians, with the warfare which it brought in its train, not only gave little leisure for industry, but the constant movement of armed hosts made settled work of any sort impossible. There was also the less occasion for skilled labour, as food and clothing and weapons were the principal wants of those conquering and uncultured hordes from the North. The misery, however, which these men caused as they marched was felt less by the Jews than by the natives of the soil, whose peaceful homes and whose growing crops were destroyed. Jews, by this time, were used to most minor hardships. They had, for very long, been wanderers and pariahs. They had been learning now for centuries, to ‘hold all mortal joys with a loose hand.’ ‘I do not call my wife wife, but home,’ said a Jewish scholar once. The tender little love speech came to have a very wide and literal meaning. Home, in our sense of the word, was to the Jew often roofless, and his pack served for his pillow. But steadfast, faithful affection, as often, walled the roofless dwelling round like a fenced city, and wife and children made ‘home’ to him out of the most unlikely places.

Jews accepted the new state of things. They bravely adapted themselves to the altered circumstances of their lot, and made the best of it. They had to live, though a hard and hurried and undignified sort of living it became. With a quickness which experience taught and self-interest quickened, they tried to make themselves useful and acceptable. Their own wants, as wayfarers in strange lands, made them swift to perceive the wants of others. They used their sorrows for stepping-stones. They had known ‘straitness and the want of all things;’ surely they could supply some. Such property as they managed to keep must needs have been of a portable sort, and much of it of a serviceable kind, and likely to prove useful to rough new-comers. Barter would naturally ensue, and what the purchaser could not get from the Jew at hand could probably be obtained, through his medium, from a Jew farther off. And this was the very small beginning of the great system of international trading, in which Jews have so large a share. The descendants of David the sweet singer, and of Ezra the Scribe, and of countless unrecorded generations who ‘gathered in their wine and their oil,’ and were ‘skilful in all manner of workmanship,’ turned to buying and selling, and often to haggling and to hoarding. It was circumstances which made traders out of the studious, vine-growing handicraftsmen of the Book. And it was circumstances, quite as much as their own wits, which made them successful and proficient at their new calling. Jews were widely dispersed and yet closely connected, and were forced to be onlookers rather than actors in the world’s affairs. This position gave them exceptional opportunities for trading. They were denied all healthy and ordinary ambitions, and thus money-making became to them an interesting and sometimes an absorbing pursuit, even when it was not; which it mostly was, a painful and sordid necessity. Jews ceased to be producers; the Land and the Book seemed alike to be closed against them. They developed into the chief traders and financiers of the Middle Ages, ranging from pedlars and hawkers to contractors of State loans.

=5. The Slave Trade.=――The incessant warfare, and the imperfect civilisation, of these early centuries made of men and women and children a recognised article of commerce. Selling people into slavery has a dreadful sound, but in those days it was not quite so dreadful a thing, nor even so avoidable a one, as it would be in these. Great tracts of cultivated land were constantly being laid waste; what was to be done with the vanquished dwellers thereon? In that rough and ready system of waging war, it was centuries too soon for trying any of our modern methods of treaties of peace or diplomatic settlement. The hostile inhabitants of a conquered state had to be exterminated or to be rendered harmless. It really resolved itself with the victors into a question of slaughter or of slavery. And of that hard choice, slavery was possibly the less uncomfortable fate to the conquered, whilst to the conquerors it was decidedly the more economical arrangement, and on the whole, perhaps, the more humane; for, transformed from enemies into property, the slaves were pretty sure of fair treatment from buyer and from seller both, and their chief hardship would be the chance of being sold in separate lots, and of being divided from their families as well as from their country.

=6. Jews as Slave-owners.=――In their owners, at any rate, as events turned out, the captives were, for the most part, fortunate. The principal purchasers of slaves were found among the Jews. Jews were so widely scattered by this time that they seemed to be always and everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to pay. They were the kindest of masters. ‘Remember how ye were slaves in the land of Egypt,’ is the preface to God’s law on the treatment of dependants. ‘For ye know the heart of a stranger,’ is further and tenderly urged. To the credit of these trading Jews, so often tempted to drive a hard bargain, to seem and even to be hard, and sordid, and grasping――to their credit be it said that they acted in the spirit of their Law, and proved the gentlest and most generous slave-owners the world has ever known. So fond grew the grateful slaves of their Jewish masters, that they very often desired to become Jews themselves, and were thus the indirect cause of an immense deal of harsh and suspicious legislation. The Church conscientiously abhorred Jews. It could not be expected to look on calmly at the possible manufacture of more of them. So council after council of the Church busied itself in devising plans to prevent, or in imposing penalties to punish, any conversions to Judaism.

=7. Church Councils.=――The early Church, in its practice as in its precepts, borrowed much from the ancient Synagogue. The Sanhedrin was something of a model for the Council. Both assemblies claimed a supreme authority quite independently of political conditions. The new faith had held its first deliberative sitting at Jerusalem about the year 50, when the matter to decide was the question, which had been raised at Antioch, whether heathen converts could dispense with the Abrahamic covenant. According to Church tradition, a brother of Jesus presided at this assembly, and Paul opened the discussion. At any rate, this was the very first so-called Council of the Church. As time went on the meetings multiplied, though the debates were rarely decisive of such great issues as was that first one. Jews were a frequent and favourite subject for discussion, and concerning them the expression of opinion and the consequent legislation were apt to be, unhappily, unanimous. There were occasional exceptions. The Pope or Father of the Church, for the time being, was the head of these councils, and towards the end of the sixth century, when Gregory I. was Pope, his firmness and humanity for a brief while gave some check to the persecuting mania. Pope Gregory was just as much in earnest as any of the Church dignitaries, past or present, in hating the slave trade, but he hated it because it was slavery, and not only because Jews were slave-owners. He loved righteousness and he hated wrong-doing, but he did not put Jewish or Christian labels on these things, and love or hate accordingly. Pope Gregory was several centuries in advance of his age.

=8. Eastern Jews.=――Whilst the Goths and the Vandals were overrunning Europe, and the Jews of the West were turning into pedlars, the Jews of the East were also beginning to have a history apart from their schools. For nearly 500 years the history of the Babylonian Jews was almost that of the happy nations who have none. From the time when Jerusalem fell, till the beginning of the sixth century, the troubles of the Jews who were settled on the banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates had been but slight; occasionally irritating, but very rarely serious. In Mesopotamia, for a very long period, Jews as citizens were undistinguishable from other citizens, and they on their side, as a certain Rabbi Samuel expressed it, ‘respected the law of the land no less than the law of Moses.’ Their Judaism was absolutely uninterfered with, and they had leisure for little scholarly quarrels among themselves. There was, it is true, a fanatic sect among the fire-worshippers, who were often trying to disturb the pleasant and peaceful terms on which the Jews lived with their Persian masters, but they seldom succeeded. Unluckily, however, neither the peace nor the pleasantness was secure; both depended on a good many causes, among which the disposition of the reigning ruler counted for much. At the beginning of the sixth century troubles began for the Eastern Jews, and speedily grew formidable. In the year 530 their reigning רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא Prince of the Captivity, was hanged by order of the State. This act was followed by other persecuting measures. Many Jewish religious rites were prohibited, and the schools were closed. Luckily, by this time the great work of the schools was accomplished, the Babylonian Talmud having been finished by Rabbi Aschi some forty years before.

=9. War between the Persian and the Byzantine Empires.=――Early in the next century there was a terrible struggle between the Persians and the Romans, or, to be exact, between the Persians and that Eastern division (all that was left by this date) of the great Roman Empire which held its court at Constantinople, and which was now called the Byzantine Empire. The Jews throughout the Persian dominions, despite recent differences, were loyal to their Persian masters, and helped them to fight and to conquer. Egypt and Syria were wrested from the Romans, and Jerusalem fell before the Persian arms. Throughout the war the Jews helped the Persians loyally as Persian subjects, but in Jerusalem it is to be feared that the Jews fought rather as personal, than as Persian, enemies of Rome. The old scenes brought back the old memories, and Jews remembered only too well and too fiercely. There was terrible fighting in Jerusalem. The church which Constantine’s mother, the Empress Helena, had built on the ruins of the Temple, was pulled down, the Christians were cruelly massacred or sold as slaves, or sometimes sold as slaves and then massacred. It was to a great extent a religious war, which accounts for its bitterness. The Persians were monotheistic in their faith, and they hated what was pagan in Christianity, the trinity of Gods, the plurality of saints, and the worship of relics. The successes of Chosroes, the Persian Emperor, did not, however, last long. Twenty years later the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius reversed it all. He reduced the Persian ruler to submission, he made Syria and Egypt come again under his control, he rebuilt his churches in Jerusalem, and forbade the Jews, as in the days of Hadrian, to approach within a certain measured distance of its walls. This was contrary to the promise which the Emperor had made to the Jews, and was a weak concession to the wishes of the bishops, who readily, however, gave him absolution for breaking his word.