Chapter XXXI: Dawn

=1. Beginning of Better Days in Holland.=――At last, after the thick darkness and the waning stars, some faint streaks of dawn began slowly to appear. It was on ugly, flat, Dutch marshes that the new light of liberty first tremblingly broke, and its unaccustomed rays touched the sluggish canals and solid bridges of the ancient city of Amsterdam into a beauty that had been lacking to the picturesque minarets of Spain, and gave to the respectable Dutch burghers a dignity that is somehow absent from the stateliest of Spanish grandees. It was in 1591 that the first small settlement of Jews was made in Holland, and these earliest settlers were Marannos from Spain. Religious intolerance in the Peninsula had grown no less fierce since the days of Torquemada, and under the gloomy fanatic Philip II., the widower of our poor, merciless Queen Mary, all the worst terrors and persecutions of the Inquisition had been revived. The New Christians, or Marannos, as the disguised Jews of Spain and Portugal were called, felt, under Philip’s sway, less secure than ever from suspicion and its terrible consequences. Emigration seemed their only chance of safety, but, as of old, there was small choice of safe asylum. England and France were still closed against declared Jews; the Popes and princes of Italy were hostile to them; Germany was cruelly inhospitable; and Turkey sounded very foreign and very far off to these cultivated and somewhat self-indulgent Marannos. At last in their straits they bethought themselves of brave little Holland, whose people had fought as sturdily to guard their shores from the inroads of Inquisitors as from the inroads of the ocean, and had made of their enemy, the sea, an ally against the Spaniards.[44] In the States which had revolted from the cruel supremacy of Spain, and had struggled so heroically for national and religious independence, there seemed to be a certainty of freedom of conscience being accorded to all citizens. The Marannos had come to be very tired and very impatient of their masks, worn though they were amid the palms and the orange groves. And so it came to pass that, at the end of the sixteenth century, a little party of Spanish Jewish refugees made this fresh experiment for life, and were most kindly and generously received by the Protestant inhabitants of the new republic of the Netherlands.

=2. The New Jerusalem.=――The emigrants who thus sought the hospitality of the States were, in truth, of a sort to make the Dutchmen very satisfied with their own unfashionable virtue of religious tolerance. It was no hungry, pushing crowd of traders, eager only for bare livelihood, who made their way to this new country. Spain, for all the fetters she had laid for centuries on the consciences of her subjects, had also for centuries given full opportunity for every energy which they might possess to develop in the service of the state. Jews do not restrict themselves to commerce when they have chance and choice of other pursuits. As open and declared Jews so long as they could, and then, when they could not, as Marannos, the Jews of the Peninsula, since the occupation by the Moors, had held office as statesmen and as finance ministers, and had been distinguished among the physicians and scholars and poets of their country, as well as among its landowners and its merchants. It was thus a highly intelligent, and cultivated, and fairly well-off little community which threw off its disguise of New Christians, and hastened to settle down as self-respecting Jews in Amsterdam. They lost no time in building themselves a synagogue, and in establishing schools. Their first synagogue was built in 1598, and seventy years later there were several prosperous places of worship. The old scholarly instinct of Judaism, which had asserted itself in so many epochs, and in so many parts of the world, at Jamnia and at Sora, at Alexandria and at Cordova, revived again, and Amsterdam grew into a quaint Dutch likeness of them all. The men of light and leading in Holland gave a glad welcome to these congenial spirits from Spain, and Amsterdam, with its happy, honoured, and rapidly increasing Jewish colony, came to be called the New Jerusalem. In 1619, sufficiently full legal rights were secured to the immigrants, and the Jews of Holland gradually became no inconsiderable addition to the commerce and the culture of the country.

=3. Sephardim and Ashkenazim.=――Many delightful qualities have their corresponding defects. The refugees from Spain had some drawbacks to their cultivated minds and their refined manners. They were very superior, but they were also, on occasion, not a little selfish. They valued much their training in the old country, and the consideration which it gained for them in the new. They valued it, in fact, so much, that they desired to keep it wholly to themselves, and not to risk any loss of social standing by contact with less creditable co-religionists. Naturally enough, when the poor downtrodden Jews of Germany heard of this happy little settlement in Amsterdam, many journeyed thither, hoping to find toleration from strangers and a welcome from their brethren in faith. In this latter hope they were disappointed. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews kept themselves proudly and distinctly aloof from the German Jews, refusing even to intermarry with them. The Sephardim and Ashkenazim[45] Jews of Holland were, from the very first, entirely separate communities, worshipping in different synagogues, learning in different schools, supporting each their own charities, and using each their own prayer-books, with not even the pronunciation of the ancient language in common. The German Jews, as a body, were, it is undeniable, of a distinctly lower tone, in regard to occupation and education and refinement, to these others. It was impossible, from the widely different antecedents and experiences of both communities, that things should have been otherwise, and many of the differences between them were quite inevitable. Still, that resolute aloofness from the unattractive Ashkenazim was not a nice attitude on the part of the prosperous and respected Sephardim. Excuses may be found for them; their own position was certainly not very secure. Still the fact remains that the Sephardim, under pressure of circumstances, did what the prophet Isaiah warns us all from doing――they ‘hid themselves from their own flesh.’

=4. Spanish Jews in Holland.=――Quite as surely, if not quite as conspicuously, as the Ashkenazim showed signs of the treatment to which they had been subject in Germany, did the Sephardim bear traces of the experiences which they had undergone in Spain. The defects which persecution had developed in the one case were the more disagreeable and more apparent, but they were hardly as harmful as some tendencies which a long course of religious hypocrisy had created in the other. The German Jew had worn the yellow badge for centuries, and something of the look, and something of the habits, of an outcast disfigured him still; the Spanish Jew, to escape the fate of the persecuted, had taken upon him the disguise of the persecutors, and some remnants of the fierce, intolerant Catholicism of Spain unhappily clung to him for a long while after his close-fitting mask of New Christian had been flung aside.

=5. Their Acquired Intolerance.=――It is a sad thing to find that Jews, who had so suffered from the terrors of the Inquisition, should have set up a little tribunal of their own, and invested it with similar powers over religious offences; and very strange that those who had experienced the horrors of penance and excommunication should have imitated the proceedings of those persecutors in the treatment of members of their own faith, whom they considered heretical in religious matters. But this actually happened. The effects of persecution have now and again made Jews a little ‘mixed’ in their morals as well as in their manners. The Jews of Holland, with that long-denied gift of religions freedom at last in their hands, grasped it somewhat over-tight, and in their delight at holding their Judaism fast and firm in the sight of all men, they were not always quite as careful as they might have been to do unto others as they were so very thankful to be at last done unto.

=6. An Instance in Point: Uriel da Costa.=――Amongst those disguised Jews of Spain who, the better to conceal their Judaism, went even to the length of taking the office and performing the rites of Catholic priests, was a certain Uriel da Costa. When the Amsterdam settlement gave its chance to Jews of living true lives, da Costa gladly enough left Spain, threw off his disguise, and joined his brethren in faith. But he had been for too many years dwelling as a Catholic among Catholics to be able to become all at once a strict and orthodox Jew. He had grown used to ceremonial of one sort, ceremonial of another sort, perhaps even, for a while, of any sort, was irksome to him. He neglected Jewish observances, and, what was less pardonable, he spoke and wrote against many cherished Jewish practices, denouncing and ridiculing them as relics of formalism and superstition. It was something more than imprudent. His own long failure in courageous profession of his faith should have led da Costa to consider himself quite unfitted to give any opinion whatever as to the correct forms of its observance. He had expressed his Judaism throughout the best part of his life by entire silence: silence would better have become him still. He had submitted to circumstances, and lived a life of active religious deceit: it could have been no great strain on such a seasoned conscience to conform to what the bulk of his people were content to accept. Little sympathy can be felt with the hasty attitude of opposition in which da Costa conceitedly placed himself to the congregation of Amsterdam, but still less for the unfortunate spirit in which his opposition was resisted. He was first excommunicated by theological authority, and a little later, when he had published an attack upon the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, he was sentenced by the Dutch civic authority, which the congregation most unwisely invoked, to a term of imprisonment. So closed the first act in this discreditable affair.

Some years later, da Costa, grown older and perhaps wiser, wished to be reconciled with his co-religionists, and made formal application for the ban of excommunication to be lifted from him. Here was an excellent opportunity for burying the hatchet, and for the authorities to accept da Costa’s overtures as a sufficient acknowledgment on his part that he had been in the wrong. Unluckily, old associations with that dreadful Inquisition were deeply implanted in the members of the Amsterdam congregation. They were no longer New Christians, but they were also not quite yet true Jews. It was resolved that Uriel da Costa should be pardoned, but there was a horrible and grotesque imitation of Torquemada’s barbarous programme when the penitent was received back into the synagogue. A special service was held, a ‘confession’ of his sins was required to be read aloud by the suppliant, a sermon was preached at him, stripes to the number of nine-and-thirty were laid upon him with no gentle hand, and one after another, over his prostrate body, the elders of the congregation solemnly stepped. Then the curse, which no human being has any shadow of right to pronounce, was declared to be removed from him. It was altogether a terribly unjewish and mistaken proceeding. Every society or community has, undoubtedly, the right to lay down certain rules by which they will receive new members, or expel old ones, just as every father has a right, and even a duty, to keep from his house persons whose influence he fears as dangerous to the morals of his children. But to punish is another matter. No opinions, however mischievous, could justify such treatment as da Costa received at the hands of the Amsterdam community, and his next act put these bigoted interpreters of a bad system yet more hopelessly in the wrong. Two days after that humiliating scene in the synagogue (in April 1640), da Costa shot himself, and thus aroused a sympathy which on the merits of the case, had it been properly dealt with, would have been given neither to him nor to any one of his actions.