Chapter XX: Three Witnesses 281 (3)

The periodical assemblies of witches believed to occur in various wild places were called “Witches’ Sabbaths,” because Jews were supposed to be the chief attendants at them. They there received their wages for supporting the kingdom of Antichrist. They celebrated a grand mass before the Devil. The blood of Christian children was said to be essential to their sacrifices. In some regions where, under the ancient religion, the effigy of winter had been burnt on one or another day of spring, it became the custom to burn it on Good Friday and under the name of Judas. The ceremony of scourging and burning Judas still takes place annually in the London Docks. In Spain it is considered necessary to spit after pronouncing the word “Jew;” and from that country the paganised effigies of that people have spread through distant regions of the world. In some regions (as Oldenberg) the birthday of poor everlasting Judas is said to be February 14, in others (as Franconia) it is fixed as April 1, and these days are unlucky. The stigma of Iscariot passed upon certain trees, as the aspen, which was said to tremble perpetually because he hung upon it; and the Judas-tree, with its blood-drop blossoms. In the Bergstrasse, or high road between Darmstadt and Heidelberg, the peasantry still believe that every Jew possesses the “evil eye,” and that if a sick person wishes to die swiftly he must get a Rabbi to pray for his convalescence. In sundry places Jews are believed able to foretell the weather by means of dividing a loaf of bread, putting the parts together again, and shoving it with a mysterious word into an oven. They are also believed to spread diseases by spells written in Hebrew on bits of paper, and to deal in such charms. In some regions noises heard in mines were indifferently attributed to kobolds, or to the ghosts of Jews believed to have been made to work in them as slaves by the Romans. In East Friesland it is considered very unlucky to meet a Jew first in the morning; if a Jew is the first to enter one’s house on Monday, or even to look into the window, it renders the whole week unlucky to the house, and was once an offence that might be prosecuted.[25] Other Jews impaled in the ever-repeated Christian legend took on, in the popular imagination, the diabolical forms into which the pagan deities had been degraded by missionaries. In storms Herod was said still to hunt the Innocents. The Perigord peasant names the fierce thunderstorm “la chasse Herode.” This was probably an ingenious development of the Herr-Rote, or Haar-Rote, the red-haired demon-huntsman. Associated with him was Herodias. Grimm says that the Italians sometimes identify their misshapen fairy Befana--a terror to children, who has sprung out of Epiphania--as Herod’s daughter (Salome); so that both mother and daughter were made into evil wanderers.[26] Herodias, who prompted her daughter to demand the head of John the Baptist, was associated with Diana and Holda in the nocturnal expeditions of demons and witches. She was at the head of an aerial host of such. Only from midnight to cockcrow can she rest, and then sits upon oaks and hazel-trees. She was said to have an unrequited passion for John, and when his head was brought in on a charger would have kissed it, but it recoiled and blew upon her, and she was whirled into the air, where she wanders. In Lower Saxony whirlwinds are accounted for by the dancing of Herodias, as elsewhere to that of the devil. Herod and Herodias are said by Josephus to have been banished to Lyons, and eventually to have died in Spain; perhaps this may account for the special prominence she holds in the folk-lore of Spanish America. In Mexico the puppet Herodias dances in a kind of Punch and Judy show in Holy Week, to the music of rattles made of “Judas bones.” In Eugene Sue’s _Wandering Jew_ Herodias appears in Arctic America. M. Gaston Paris cites several Italian proverbs in which Judas and Malchus are united (as in Sicily, _lu Juda--Marcu_) to characterise an ugly or unpleasant countenance. It has been thought (though I have not investigated the matter) that our puppet-show, _Punch and Judy_, is a distant outcome of an old play, _Pontius cum Judæis_, in which the Jews were severely handled by the pro-consul.

X.

THE WEIRD OF THE WANDERER.

There is one class of survivals from the fatalistic ideas of all so-called paganisms which have always been very strong in the popular mind of Europe. It was a creed in which all ancient faiths converged, that an irresistible power was lodged in any officially-uttered curse. The word once solemnly spoken, became the weird, the fatum, and not even the tongue that spake could revoke it. Oftenest the dooms that represented this belief in the Middle Ages were supposed to come from Heaven in response to some defiant invocation, or blasphemous challenge like that of the Flying Dutchman. It is a notable fact for the antiquarian that in the year 1881 the courts of England should be trying a case involving the question of whether a lecturer took out his watch and gave the deity, whose existence he denied, five minutes to strike him dead. That is an old myth normally fixed on misbelievers; and it is probable that the motives for selecting that particular slander for judicial denial, if traced out, would be found connected with the ancient superstition that such words must have the eternal effect of real natural forces. From the ancient patriarchalism, which has so many political and social survivals in Europe, came the idea that a father’s curse (or blessing) carried with it the fatal forces of the universe. More universal still was the potency supposed to attend the word of a priest, however casual. This notion is still met with in the many stories of persons said to have died soon after ridiculing the proceedings of “revivalists.”

Grässe has collected some examples of such superstitions in Europe, beginning so far back as the legend of Domitilla, the grand-daughter of Domitian. In her room, after she had become a Christian, her husband introduced dancers to win her back to the world and to himself: he began showing them how to dance, but could not stop; and after dancing two days and nights, died. Such “dances” are now familiar in folk-lore, and are associated with some of the stone circles of England. In Kolbeck, near Halbustadt, there is a legend that, in the year 1012, a peasant named Albrecht and fifteen others who danced before the Church on Christmas while Mass was going on, were ordered by the priest to dance for a year. The Bishop of Cologne had to come and release these dancers, who had worn a deep hole in the ground. In the same vein is the story of “the merry smith of Jüterbogk,” a small survival of Sisyphus. A remarkable story of this kind is that of Freiburg (A. Müller, _Theatr. Freiburg Chron._, 1633). An irritable father, Lorent Richter, ordered his son of fourteen years to do something: the boy hesitated, standing in the middle of the room. “Cursed boy,” cried the father, “may you stand there for ever!” The boy remained standing there, propped by supports, and after many years the priests, by many prayers, could only secure the small commutation of a removal to a corner where he would not be so much in the way of the household. “At last the kind God a little altered the punishment by allowing him to sit during the last six months of the year, and also to lie in a bed placed near him. When asked what he did, he answered that he was punished by God the Lord for his sins; that he left all to His will; and trusted in the merits of Christ to obtain final happiness.” After seven years--a number associated with many famous sleepers--the boy “was relieved, 11th Sept., 1552.” His footprints were pointed out on the floor for a hundred years. The father had wished to obliterate this memento of his anger, but the authorities decided that the footprints should remain as a warning to wrathful parents and disobedient children.

The great majority of “dooms” known to Northern paganism have exchanged connotations with the legend of the Wandering Jew. The sentence pronounced upon such royal huntsmen or robber-knights as Dyterbjernat of Danzig, Diedrick of Bern, Duke Abel the fratricide (Schleswig), and others, is usually of this character. In the Netherlands it is the story of a son who refused to listen to his father’s Christian advice, but called his dogs into the wood: the father cried, “Hunt, then, for ever!” and so he hunts on, and his voice, mingled with the baying of dogs, is heard in the woods about the Castle of Wynedal. In Thuringia, it is Hakelnberg who would not listen to the priest, who bade him “hunt until the last day.” These formulas of the curse are related to that of the Jew legend: the primitive pagan legend is different, _e.g._ the hunt long known as the Horlething, on the banks of the Wye. It was said King Herla went to the marriage feast of a dwarf: when he returned to his palace he found that he had been in the mountain with the dwarf two hundred years, and was under a doom to ride on until the day of judgment. The visit to the dwarfs festival simply meant a relapse into paganism.

That the myth of the Wandering Jew was interwoven with that of the Demon Huntsman of Germany (which is called Aaskarreya in Norway), there can be no doubt. “Perhaps,” says Karl Blind, “one of the clearest proofs of the phantom figure of the Wandering Jew having been grafted upon that of the great Wanderer and World-hunter, Wodan, is to be found in a tale of the Hartz Mountains. There it is said that the Wild Huntsman careers ‘over the seven mountain-towns every seven years.’ The reason given for his ceaseless wanderings is, that ‘he would not allow our Lord Jesus Christ to quench his thirst at a river, nor at a water-trough for cattle, from both of which he drove him away, telling him that he ought to drink from a horse-pond.’ For this reason the Wild Huntsman must wander about for ever, and feed upon horseflesh. And whoever calls out after him, when his ghostly chase comes by, will see the Wild Huntsman turn round, and be compelled by him to eat horseflesh too. No allusion whatever is made in this tale to a Jew, though the name of Christ is pressed into it in a way very like the Ahasuerus legend. We seem to get here a mythic rendering of the struggle between the old Germanic faith and the Christian religion. The ‘horse-pond’ and the ‘horseflesh’ are, to all appearances, references to our horse-worshipping, horse-sacrificing, horseflesh-eating forefathers, who came to Britain under the leadership of Hengist and Horsa. To call out after the eternal Huntsman entails the danger of being forced by him to eat horseflesh--that is, to return to the old creed. The Holy Supper of the Teutonic tribes consisted of horseflesh and mead. When Christianity came in, the eating of horseflesh was abolished as a heathen custom. But at German witches’ banquets--in other words, at secret festive ceremonies in which the pagan traditions were still kept up--there continued for a long time a custom of drinking from horse-shoes.”[27]

We have in this sentence last quoted from Mr. Blind’s able article a suggestion of the probable origin of the horse-shoe as a charm against witches. To the pagan Teuton it was as sacred an emblem as to the Christian his cross. While the Christians still believed in the power of the Wild Huntsman and his train to work them mischief, they might naturally show this symbol of pagan orthodoxy over their doors to induce the witches to pass on and visit their wrath on the openly disloyal.

This article in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ contains an original speculation and theory concerning two remarkable problems connected with our legend. How is it that the name Cartaphilus was replaced by Ahasuerus? How did the “doorkeeper” of the thirteenth century become the “shoemaker” of the sixteenth century legend? Mr. Blind, with a creditable caution, suggests that the name may have been a modification of As-Vidar. This god (_As_) Vidar was in the Scandinavian mythology the symbol of everlasting force: he was the deity who was alone to survive the universal destruction of Ragnarök, “Twilight of the Gods.” In the Prose Edda it is written: “The Wolf (Fenris) swallows Odin, but at that instant Vidar advances, and setting his foot on the monster’s lower jaw, seizes the other with his hand, and thus tears and rends him till he dies. Vidar is able to do this because he wears shoes for which stuff has been gathering in all ages, namely, the shreds of leather which are cut off to form the toes and heels of shoes; and it is on this account that those who would render a service to the Æsir (gods) should take care to throw such shreds away.” It is said there are (or were) preserved in the Government Library at Berne traditional relics left by the Wandering Jew, his staff and pair of shoes. These shoes are said, by an early local authority, to be “uncommonly large and made of a hundred snips--a shoemaker’s master-piece, because patched together with the utmost labour, diligence, and cleverness out of so many shreds of leather.” A similar pair of shoes are said to have also been left by Ahasuerus at Ulm.

It may be remarked that the name given to the Wandering Jew in the _Praxis Alchymine_ of Libavius, viz., Buttadæus, may possibly refer to the boot (A. S. _butte_) of the Wanderer, and it may have been that _deus_ was added. Whether it meant the “booted god,” or the man who struck God with a boot, or _bouter dieu_ (to push God), must remain doubtful. It is a striking coincidence, if no more, that, in Talmudic legend, Enoch also was a shoemaker, who with every stitch exclaimed, “The Lord and His Majesty be praised!”

The names of the Wandering Jew are characteristically various, not to say vagarious; they are also sometimes puzzling. Cartaphilus is pretty certainly κάρτα φίλος, in allusion to the “beloved” disciple; Ahasuerus is perhaps the Hebrew form of Xerxes, though there is nothing in the history of that king to connect him with the Wandering Jew. Several give his name as Gregorius, through a mistake, as M. Paris has pointed out, as to the meaning of Botoreius, who wrote that Jesus stopped “ante tabernam gregorii illius;” the Turkish Spy names him Michob Ader. One name popularly ascribed to him in Brussels is “Isaac Laquedem.” Concerning this Grässe has a note in which he says, “I asked for an explanation of the word, and my friend Dr. Böttcher, the celebrated expert in Hebrew, gave me the following answer, ‘If the name Laquedem is written and pronounced in French (Walloon) “Lakedem,” and is derived from the Hebrew, it can scarcely be anything else but la-kĕdem, _i.e._, “the former world” [belonging to an anterior world], in which case we must say the use of the prefix “la” is without a parallel in names of later Jews, and therefore the “la,” the French article, may be considered due to a half-learned inventor of names (_vide_ Lacroix, Lamarque, La Loresh. Wolf, _Bibl. Hebr._ iv. 812).’”

As for the name “Joseph,” given by the Armenian Bishop as the baptismal name of Cartaphilus, there is evidence in the old Chronicle itself that it was derived by association with Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have wandered through a large part of the world and to have come to Britain in the year 66, where his blossoming staff fixed the site of Glastonbury Abbey.

It is an indication of the steadiness with which every being, however exalted originally, was degraded by coming under the supposed preternatural fate of the Jewish race, that this Joseph of Arimathea, by giving a baptismal name to Cartaphilus, gave the English populace their epithet for the beggars or impostors who were supposed to be the Wandering Jew. He was called “Poor Joe!” Of him, as representing the dregs of the myth, more must be said hereafter. Another example of this degradation is shown in the fact that in various parts of Europe the storm-demon is called _Maccabee_. The process by which this was brought about has not, to my knowledge, been traced, but the following facts seem to bear on it.

In 2 Maccabæus, v. 2–4, it is written--“Then it happened that through all the city, for the space almost of forty days, there were seen horsemen running in the air, in cloth of gold, and armed with lances like a band of soldiers.... Wherefore every man prayed that that apparition might turn to good.” These apparitions, resembling those said by Josephus to have reappeared at the siege of Jerusalem, were adopted as good Christian omens. Judas Maccabæus also records his vision of the prophet Jeremiah giving him a golden sword to defend the holy people. It is probable that this was the germ of the superstition which proved so fatal to the Christians at the siege of Constantinople (1453). After the capture of the city, men, women and children rushed into the Church of St. Sophia for protection, because of a prophecy that “one day the Turks would enter Constantinople and pursue the Romans as far as the column of Constantine in the square before St. Sophia; but that this would be the term of their calamities; that an angel would descend from heaven with a sword in his hand, and would deliver the empire, with that celestial weapon, to a poor man seated at the foot of the column. ‘Take this sword,’ would he say, ‘and avenge the people of the Lord.’ At these animating words the Turks would instantly fly.... While they expected the descent of the tardy angel, the doors were broken with axes; and, as the Turks encountered no resistance, their bloodless hands were employed in selecting and securing the multitude of their prisoners” (Gibbon, ch. lxviii.).

It looks as if the association of the wild aerial chase with _Maccabee_, in France and other southern regions, might have resulted from the diffusion of the superstition which drew such a thunderbolt upon the Christians of Constantinople, and its gradual subjection to the demonising doom which rested upon even the brightest figures of Jewish history not wearing the Christian uniform.

XI.

“THE VERY DEVIL INCARNATION.”

“Enter Launcelot Gobbo!” So begins Scene ii. of Act II. in the _Merchant of Venice_. Or as the original stage-direction ran, “Enter the Clown!” His very name suggests the glutton and knave, yet it seems to be from him some Shakspearian guides derive their chief light on the great poet’s picture of Shylock!

Gobbo does indeed cast light upon the Jew, but it comes from the mob which he represented. To say “my master is a very Jew,” and “the Jew ... is the devil himself,” are equivalent phrases in the capacious mouth of Gobbo. He speaks for his gaping herd, and their breed is not unknown. Judenhetze is able to turn out such men in the latter days of the nineteenth century.

Bochart, in his _Hierozoicon_ (seventeenth century), says there was a Sea-monster called “The Old Jew;” with the white-bearded face of a man he had the hairy body of an ox, otherwise calf-shaped. This monster always appeared the night before Saturday on the surface of the sea, and one could see him until sunset next day leaping and diving like a frog, and following ships. This monster, no doubt a variety of Al-Sâmeri, elsewhere considered, is a fair type of what every Jew was, for many centuries, in the eyes of the multitudinous Gobbites. What stood for religion in them was the vulgar ribaldry of the Miracle Plays, under which those holy farces presently perished. In them Judas, still the buffeted Wanderer, was the one figure-head of the Jewish race, with the devil for his familiar.

In ancient Persian pictures Ahriman and his host have flame for hair. After the introduction of Christianity the deities of Europe, which it degraded to devils, were described and painted with fiery hair and beard; as it stands in the German saying, “Roter Bart, Teufelsart.” In the early Miracle Plays Judas was made up with red hair and beard to show the fiery abode to which he belonged. This feature survived also in the “yellow bonnet” which the Jews were compelled to wear, which replaced the scarlet or red bonnets which the “Scarlet Woman” found too like her own.[28] The significant costume, and the ideas it expressed, passed to the conventional stage-Jew. Barabas, in Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_, and after him, Shylock, were represented with the “orange-tawny bonnet,” and fiery red hair and beard.

In keeping with this the crimes popularly ascribed to the Jews, for which they suffered so terribly, were not human crimes. They were utterly without motive--such as no man, however vile, could have committed. For one example out of many, the Jews of Lincoln were charged with having fattened a Christian child of eight years on white bread and milk, then scourged him, crowned him with thorns, crucified him, giving him gall. For that impossible crime 112 eminent Jews were tortured and slain. It was rumoured that the earth would not receive the body of that child, yet for years Christian pilgrims visited its grave.

Such wild, popular notions were faithfully reflected in Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_. “Barabas,” says Charles Lamb, “is a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose, to please the rabble. He kills in sport--poisons whole nunneries--invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners, _by the Royal command_, when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the cabinet.”

It will be now apparent to those who have followed the travels of this Jew-myth that it had carried about in its endless wanderings the belief in which it originated, and of whose development it was a type--the infranatural, finally the infernal, nature of the Jewish race. It inevitably blended with all the superstitions about uncanny phantoms, bringing the most evil and ominous shapes haunting the popular imagination in every locality into connection with the detested race. Demons from the air, goblins from their caves, birds of ill-omen, fearful gales, betokening the proximity of the Wandering Phantom, brought an ever-accumulating mass of fear, suspicion and hatred upon the race of which its supposed doom was a too faithful emblem. This vast cesspool of vulgar superstition mirrored the dogmas of a theology ever developing downward. It was not permitted the masses to look upon the alleged offences of Judas or Ahasuerus in comparison with offences familiar to them. As we have seen, the offence thought of was the wrong and insult done to a God; it was an intensification of the same feeling that regarded theft from a church as worse than theft from the poorest widow, or a slight untruth under oath as more wicked than the most malicious lie not sworn to. Out of such a principle of unreason naturally came the doom of a race through many centuries to realise every ingenuity of torture fabled in the Greek Hades, with Gehenna added. Every revolving century was their Ixion-wheel, and every stream their Phlegethon.

XII.

THE WANDERING RACE.

Professor Child, of Harvard University, has remarked that, “in the second form of the legend, the punishment of perpetual existence, which gives rise to the old names, _Judæus non mortalis_, _Ewiger Jude_, is aggravated by a condemnation to perpetual change of place, which is indicated by a corresponding name, _Wandering Jew_, _Juif Errant_, etc.”[29] In this change a great deal of history is represented. The Jewish race under persecution steadily became a wandering race. They were compelled to “move on” by the remorseless police of Christendom. One after another the laws of nations detached them from the soil, from the trade-guilds, from civic position, and they became a nation without a country.

This process went on for a long time before it was represented in any myth or legend. Mohammed said, “The Jews are the People of the Book.” Joshua ben Siras ben Eliezer, a priest in Jerusalem two hundred years before the burning of the Second Temple (quoted by Heine), wrote, “All this is the Book of the Covenant made with the Most High God, namely, the Law which Moses commanded as a precious treasure to the House of Jacob. Wisdom floweth therefrom as the water of Pison when it is great, and as the water of Tigris when it overfloweth its banks in spring. Instruction floweth from it as the Euphrates when it is great, and as Jordan in the harvest. Correction cometh forth from it as the light, and as the water of the Nile in autumn. There is none that hath made an end of learning it, there is none that will ever find out all its mystery, for its wisdom is richer than any sea and its word deeper than any abyss.”

So spake the genius of Israel, and, so speaking, itself uttered its first doom. A people to whom a book had become their Fatherland, which had come to see in it their Jordan, their Tigris, their Nile, had already given up their hold upon the territories of this world and become a wandering colony of Jahve, governed by a code unrelated to the vices or the aims of other races. This abstract country, whose geography was books and texts, was fenced around and fortified as strongly as the territory of any nation. Its fortresses were ceremonies, customs, national traditions, and a perfect patience derived from faith in the God of their fathers. The Cain whom they abhorred was not more effectually “cursed from the earth,” prohibited from tillage of the ground than this race which had taken Jahve for their portion and his law for their habitation.

In such a system there could be no compromise. And as a matter of fact there never was any compromise with the enemies of their faith. These people, who have shown ingenuity and cleverness of every kind, have never developed any sort of Jesuitism. I was astonished lately at learning of an instance in which a Jew outwitted his persecutors in true Christian style, for I never heard of another. This Jew was a pedlar, and he was wandering in France in the neighbourhood of one of those districts where the Virgin Mary is still continually opening new water-cure establishments. This Jew, having heard the latest miracle which had evoked a new fountain, smiled, and even made light of it. Thereon the innkeepers excited a mob, and they resolved to hang the _miscreant_--that is, the unbeliever--faggots being old-fashioned. They seized the poor pedlar and bore him off pallid with terror. As they passed near the new fountain, the Jew begged permission to moisten his lips thereat; this was conceded, but no sooner had the water touched his lips than he leaped about with joy, and declared that the fountain had healed a severe rheumatism which he had suffered from for many years. “A miracle! a miracle!” shouted the crowd; the Jew suddenly became a hero, and was carried before the priest, who appointed the next day to baptize him before all the people and make a grand demonstration. The Jew, however, disappeared during the night.

This story, which I found in a recent number of the _Jewish World_, is a modern appendage to the old legend mentioned by Mr. Baring-Gould, that the gipsies were said to wander under a doom pronounced on them because they refused to shelter the Virgin and child in the flight into Egypt. But this witty pedlar is not a fair representative of the race. “Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” said Shylock. Though Shylock has been regarded by many as a type of avarice and extortion, yet even he cannot be tempted by money when his struggle with the Merchant becomes a religious issue. Shakspeare rightly shows Shylock unyielding; many times the money due to him cannot bribe him from the blow he feels empowered to strike for his despised Israel. And when, in the beginning of this century, Nathan Rothschild started as the great banker of London, no temptations could induce him, shrewd as he was, to lend money or enter into any contracts for the benefit of Spain or its colonies. The Israelite was never lost in the banker, and showed his supremacy when it came to a race which had banished his own from the Iberian Peninsula; though at the same time his charities and those of his house have included Christians hardly less than Jews. The same unyielding religious spirit was shown when thirty-three years ago Baron Lionel de Rothschild was elected Member of Parliament for the City of London. The honour of being the first Jew in that body could not induce him to swear his allegiance “on the true faith of a Christian,” and on the New Testament. He remained out of his seat for eleven years--and with him David Salomons, who paid the penalty of £500 for voting in the House without being duly sworn--when Parliament yielded to men who did not yield, and the oath was changed for Jews.

It has sometimes excited wonder why this wanderer among the races, uncompromising amid the hatred of ages, was not exterminated. It must often have appeared to them that, like the bush in their own legend, they were burnt without being consumed, because their God was in the bush. But no miraculous force need be sought in the case, nor any exceptional tenacity of life in them as a race; their circumstances developed in them special faculties adapted to the commerce and civilisation of the world. Heine said truly “the Jews were legally condemned to become rich.” The populace generally believed that Jewish wealth was got from the Devil, their wages for maintaining the kingdom of Antichrist in the world. The Jewish banker, Samuel Bernard, who died in 1789, leaving a large property, had a black cock which was popularly believed to be connected with his wealth. The suspicion was confirmed when the bird died a day or two before its master.

As a matter of fact the Jews were driven to deal in money and jewellery--a word supposed by some to be derived from “Jew”--by the general exclusion of them from the possession of land and from the acquisition of property by handicraft. Gold and silver alone were left for their enterprise.

And there were good causes why they amassed wealth. The first was that they did not spend it on Gentile baubles. They cared not for the pomps and luxuries of a world to which they did not belong. Why then did they want to accumulate it? Why were they so thrifty and unwearied in their pursuit of gold? To ascribe this to avarice is to accept a popular fallacy refuted by the history of that people, who are even lavish in their charities and in their support of public enterprises (as in England and America) where they are free and equal citizens. In their earlier days the Jews’ hope of recovering their country and re-establishing their Theocracy under the Messiah was a passionate aspiration, it was as sincere as any patriotism; every Jew held his wealth and his life as a trust for that end. All their wealth they hoped one day to lay at the Messiah’s feet. So it began, and then a new factor re-enforced it. The wealth of the Jews became the main means of their survival as a people. Kings and Popes protected them for the money they could get out of them. But for this they would certainly have been exterminated. From them chiefly was extorted the money for Henry the Second’s Crusade in their own Holy Land. Mainly by their labour and wealth Westminster Abbey was built. By such protective extortions there was established a certain force of natural selection and evolution, based on their wealth, which gradually made them the financial princes of Europe and bankers of the world.

Whatever German bigots may say, the financial supremacy of the Jews has been well and wisely exercised. The nations not included under it have fared according to their folly. When Queen Isabella of old wished to protect the Jews because of such advantages, she was confronted by the fanatic who said, “Judas sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver; will you sell Him for thirty millions?” So the Jews suffered in Spain; but what did Spain suffer? What did Holland and England gain by the Spanish Jews, first tolerated, then welcomed in their cities? This Germany will be able to answer if the jealous bigots there let loose on the Jews should succeed in driving them out of the country.

“Thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” So early did the compulsory tendencies of the Jews reveal themselves. Their alienation among other peoples made them close up in their ceremonial law as in a shell; their book was sealed amid inferior ‘revelations’ swarming around them, and themselves sealed in it: but, meanwhile, detached from the soil and the guilds of every country, forced to be exchangers, pedlars, they must travel to and fro, and their knowledge was increased. They became so well acquainted with the lore of different lands, with the medical and other knowledge of various countries, that they were supposed to possess occult powers. Occasionally, this reputation might be of service to them, as in the instance where Queen Elizabeth employed a Jewish physician for his supposed occult knowledge; but more often it harmed them, as in the evil fate that overtook that same physician, whom jealous rivals accused of an attempt to poison the Queen. For many centuries they presented the most remarkable instance of a people who had largely outgrown their primitive superstitions, and acquired a religious and intellectual enlightenment beyond the rest of the world, who yet kept all this culture within the hard walls of their barbaric stronghold, their ancient forms and formulas, from which they did not dare to venture.

XIII.

THE POUND OF FLESH.

Passing out of Rome by the Via Appia, one comes to many places of antiquarian interest, but presently arrives at a spot whose significance increases with time. This is the church called _Domine quo vadis_. There, says the legend, St. Peter, once more flying from danger, met Jesus, and said, “Lord, whither goest thou?” Jesus answered, ‘_Venio Romam iterum crucifigi._’ Whereupon Peter returned, and met his fate--that hard one of a mythical martyrdom, followed by resurrection as a Pontifical Jupiter, wielding his keys as thunderbolts. A fac-simile of the holy footprints of Jesus is here in the church, the originals, sunk in marble, being preserved in Saint Sebastian’s Church.

Goethe had perhaps seen the worshippers around these footprints (near by the Jewish catacomb with its seven-branch candlestick), when there arose in him the idea of a poem which, alas, never got farther than the outline given in a further chapter. Writing from Terni, October 27th, 1786, he says: “Yesterday I felt inspired to undertake a work which at present would be ill-timed. Approaching nearer and nearer to the centre of Romanism, surrounded by Roman Catholics, boxed up with a priest in a sedan, and striving anxiously to observe and to study without prejudice true nature and noble art, I have arrived at a vivid conviction that all traces of original Christianity are extinct here. Indeed, while I tried to bring it before my mind in its purity, as we see it recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, I could not help shuddering to think of the shapeless, not to say grotesque, mass of heathenism which heavily overlies its benign beginnings. Accordingly, the ‘Wandering Jew’ again occurred to me as having been a witness of all this wonderful development and envelopment, and as having lived to experience so strange a state of things, that Christ himself, when he shall come a second time to gather his harvest, will be in danger of being crucified a second time. The legend _Venio iterum crucifigi_ was to serve me as the material of this catastrophe.”[30]

Perhaps Goethe also witnessed “Holy-Cross Day” in Rome, when the Jews were “compelled to come in” and hear the annual sermon--“haled,” as one said, “as it were by the head and hair, and against their obstinate hearts, to partake of the heavenly grace.” Had the two visionary Wanderers--Jesus and Ahasuerus--once more encountered each other in sight of the crosses, they could only have hung side by side; he who gave the blow in Jerusalem, now conceivably the one person in Rome able to recognise the freshly-crucified from a cross of his own--the cross of his race. From another poet have come the words which typical Ahasuerus might, after the experience of so many centuries, speak to the fellow-sufferer he once had insulted:

“Thou art the judge. We are bruised thus,
But, the judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
Than ours is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!

“We withstood Christ then? be mindful how,
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? but the worst we spared.
To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!

“By the torture prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace.
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship--

“We boast our proof that at least the Jew,
Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.
Thy face took never so deep a shade,
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,
South, east, and on to the Pleasant Land!”[31]

Holy-Cross Day was appropriate for this work of striking the Jewish race in the face, as they fainted at the Christian door, and showing them now themselves the crucified, by a High Priest Christ taught to hate his enemies and pierce them with nail and spear. For it was about the time of the alleged discovery of the True Cross, already noticed, that this fable of the Wandering Jew probably first began its career.[32] Already at that time it was shown on the walls of imperial Christendom that Jesus and Ahasuerus, as types of Humanity, had changed places--the nails and the thorn-crown transferred from one to the other; and, what is more, the cruel dogmas and superstitions abandoned by the one made by the other into the established religion of Europe.

In the familiar legend of the True Cross, Helena is for a time baffled by a certain Judas, who has occult sources of knowledge, and warns the Jews that the empress is coming to find what, if found, will cause the downfall of their religion. But she having threatened a general massacre, the Jews inform her that this Judas can alone reveal the place of the cross. He refuses; is starved at the bottom of a dry well for six days; on the seventh, consents. When the cross appears, Judas is converted by its miracles and baptized.

In a paper read to the New Shakspeare Society, April 9th, 1875, Miss Toulmin Smith announced her discovery that the story of the “Pound of Flesh” is contained in the thirteenth century English poem, “_Cursor Mundi_,” there interwoven with the legend of the Finding of the Holy Cross. A Christian goldsmith, in the service of Queen Helena, owes a sum of money to a Jew; if he cannot pay it at a certain time he is to render the weight of the wanting money in his own flesh. The bond is forfeit; the Jew prepares to cut the flesh; but the judges decide that no drop of blood must be shed. The Jew being thus defeated, Queen Helena declares that he must give up all his goods to the State and lose his tongue. This sentence is remitted on his agreeing to tell her where the Holy Cross is hidden,--which he did.

It might easily arise, as a saga on this Jew’s knowledge, that he had personally participated in the hiding of the Cross, just after the crucifixion, and had been miraculously preserved through centuries as “a witness” to reveal its place of concealment, and thereby also to be “a witness” to the truth of the Christian legend. This might even have been in the minds of those who gave him the name of Judas, though perhaps that is merely a token of homage to the True Cross, as potent enough to convert a Judas. It is in harmony with the endless plots and counterplots of the True Cross Tale that the traitor of Christ should live to become traitor to Antichrist. At the same time there is a suggestion in it of precise retribution in kind which naturally combines with the story of the “Pound of Flesh.” It is highly probable that Shylock and the Eternal Jew are twins of the True Cross Mythology, though Ahasuerus be a later name and figure.

But this Holy Cross itself was, and is, a perpetual symbol of the pound-of-flesh principle which lay at the foundation of the ancient Jewish system, and from it, after that foundation had crumbled for the Jews, was adopted as the chief corner-stone of Christianity. This I have demonstrated elsewhere,[33] and the history of the legend, with the conclusions based on it, though they may appear here as an episode, will be found closely related to the development of our subject.

Mr. Swinburne speaks of Marlowe’s Jew as the real man, while Shakspeare’s is a mouthpiece for the finest poetry.[34] A surprising criticism! The genesis of the conventional stage-Jew in England has already been given in this work (XI.), and my reader will do well to refer to it at this point.

It is sufficiently remarkable that, in this year 1881, London should have witnessed on the stage, as acted by two eminent Shakspeare interpreters, the two stage-Jews which competed for popular favour in the time of Marlowe and Shakspeare. The “Shylock” of Mr. Booth is an odious, avaricious, bloodthirsty villain; that of Mr. Irving is a fatal, powerful and pathetic character. The fine acting of Mr. Booth cannot strive against the art of Shakspeare, who at no point could have raised sympathy with a man he meant should be utterly repulsive. Mr. Booth’s personation rests too much on the traditional make-up of Shylock, which is really that of Barabas. When Edmund Kean, as a poor unknown actor, first went to play Shylock at Drury Lane, he raised some laughter behind the scenes by taking from his small bundle a black wig! Black it was, not red; human, not diabolic: the smiling company said, “_That_ will be a failure”; but it was not. One after another the outside traits of Shylock, costume borrowed from Barabas, have disappeared; not a word of Shakspeare’s text has had to disappear with them; the character which the poet conceived has been largely unsheathed by Mr. Irving.

We know that no such figure as that at the Lyceum appeared on Shakspeare’s own stage at the Globe. Shylock, as acted by Shakspeare’s friend Burbage, was a comic figure. His make-up consisted of exceedingly red hair and beard, a false nose preternaturally long and hooked, and a tawny petticoat. Such a figure must have been largely meant to make fun for the pit and gallery, of which Shakspeare was rarely oblivious, and Burbage never.

But a conventional stage-figure is generally an evolution, and this farcical Shylock was no exception. The famous Isaac of Norwich was a typical Jew in his time. A thirteenth century caricature, preserved in the Pell Office, shows us the popular notion of him. He is pictured as a three-faced idol surrounded by devils. The three faces are not especially ugly or comical, but repulsive enough; and we may detect in the figure the reflection of a period when the diabolical theory of the Jew was serious, and no laughing matter. Similarly, in the old Miracle Plays, Satan was a serious figure, though he gradually became a mere laughing-stock, like Pantaloon in the pantomimes. The stage-Jew shared the same decline as the stage-devil--his supposed inspirer. In his malignant and formidable aspect he was, indeed, in Shakspeare’s day, the main figure of Marlowe’s popular play; but even he had the long nose and sundry grotesque features; and it can hardly be doubted that, in the still more ludicrous make-up of Shylock, the Globe Theatre followed the popular feeling.

Perhaps there may be hidden in the name Shylock the idea of a lock-shearer, shaver of the last hair from his victim; at any rate “the shearer sheared” would include the whole significance of the story which Shakspeare took in hand. In the character of Shylock, he retained the grotesquerie which might please the rabble, at the same time turning their scowl to laughter. Even now, while Mr. Irving is giving his pathetic impersonation, the occasional laugh reminds us how easily some parts of the text would lend themselves to a farcical interpretation, if the painted nose and comic gestures were present. But it is more remarkable to observe how rare and superficial are these ludicrous incidents. The farcical Shylock has passed away from the English stage through force of the more real character which Shakspeare drew. Shakspeare may not have intended all the far-reaching moral belonging to the ancient legend of the pound of flesh, but surely no one can carefully compare his Shylock with the Barabas of his contemporary without recognising a purpose to modify and soften the popular feeling towards the Jew, to picture a man where Marlowe had painted a monster, if not indeed to mirror for Christians their own injustice and cruelty.

Let us take our stand beside Portia when she summons the Merchant and Shylock to stand forth. The two men have long legendary antecedents and have met many times before. There are eleven versions of the bond story in the early literature of Europe. In four of these versions no Jew appears. Karl Simrock believes that it is an ancient law-anecdote--an illustration of the law of retaliation pressed to an extreme. The evidences he gives of its use for this purpose are interesting, and it appears to me probable that it might have been in this way that the Jew was first introduced into the story. Where a Jew and a Christian confronted each other in any issue it might be assumed that all mitigations of the _summum jus_ were removed from the question; only the naked technical terms of the law could then be conceived as restraining either from doing the utmost injury he could to the other. There is an old Persian version of the tale, in which, perhaps for a similar reason, a Moslem and an Armenian confront each other; and in this case the failure of the bond is not because of the blood, but because of the extreme exactness of weight demanded by the court. An Egyptian form of the story has a similar end.

Side by side, in all ages and races, have struggled with each other the principle of Retaliation and that of Forgiveness. In religion the vindictive principle has euphemistic names: it is called law and justice. The other principle, that of remission, has had to exist by sufferance, and in nearly all religions has been recognised only in subordinate alliance with its antagonist. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood, is primitive law. Projected into heaven, magnified in the divine majesty, it becomes the principle that a deity cannot be just and yet a justifier of offenders. “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” Since finite man is naturally assumed to be incapable of directly satisfying an infinite law, all religions, based on the idea of a divine lawgiver, are employed in devising schemes by which commutations may be secured and vicarious satisfactions of divine law obtained. Nature never forgives. No deity inferred from the always relentless forces of nature has ever been supposed able to forgive the smallest sin until it was exactly atoned for. For this reason the divine mercifulness has generally become a separate personification. The story of the “Pound of Flesh” is one of the earliest fables concerning these conflicting principles.

The following legend was related to me by a Hindu, as one he had been told in his childhood. The chief of the Indian triad, Indra, pursued the god Agni. Agni changed himself to a dove in order to escape; but Indra changed himself to a hawk, to continue the pursuit. The dove took refuge with Vishnu, second person of the triad, the Hindu Saviour. Indra flying up, demanded the dove; Vishnu, concealing it in his bosom, refused to give up the dove. Indra then took an oath that if the dove were not surrendered he would tear from Vishnu’s breast an amount of flesh equal to the body of the dove. Vishnu still refused to surrender the bird, but bared his breast. The divine hawk tore from it the exact quantity, and the drops of blood--the blood of a Saviour--as they fell to the ground wrote the scriptures of the Vedas.

Among the various versions of this story in India I have not been able to find any in accepted sacred books preserving with the simplicity of this folk-tale the ancient moral antagonism between the deities afterwards found in alliance as a triad. Hindu orthodoxy has outgrown the phase of faith which could sanction that probably provincial legend. Its spirit survives in one of Vishnu’s titles, Yadjña Varâha, “the boar of sacrifice,” derived from Vishnu’s third incarnation, by which he saved the world from demons by becoming himself a victim. We may see in the fable reflection of a sacrificial age, an age in which the will and word of a god became inexorable fate, but also the dawning conception of a divineness in the mitigation of the law, which ultimately adds saving man-gods or demi-gods to nature-gods that cannot be appeased.

The earliest version, probably B.C. 300, is the story in the Mahábhárata (_Vana parva_) of the trial of the best of mankind, King Usinára. Indra and Agni, wishing to test his fidelity to the laws of righteousness, assume the forms of falcon and pigeon. The latter (Agni) pursued by the former (Indra) seeks and receives the king’s protection. The falcon demands the pigeon, and is refused on the ground that it is written that to kill a twice-born man, to kill a cow, and to abandon a being that has taken refuge with one, are equal sins. This is a quotation from the Laws of Manu. The falcon argues that it is the law of nature that it shall feed on pigeons, and a statute against nature is no law. He (the falcon) will be starved, consequently his mate and little ones must perish, and thus in preserving one the king will slay many. The falcon is offered by Usinára other food--a boar, bull, gazelle--but the falcon declares that it is not the law of its nature to eat such things. The king then declares that he will not give up the pigeon, but he will give anything else in his power which the falcon may demand. The falcon replies that he can only accept a quantity of the king’s own flesh equal in weight to the pigeon’s body. Usinára gladly accedes to this substitution. Balances are produced, and the pigeon is placed in one scale. The king cuts off a piece of his flesh that appears large enough, but is insufficient; he cuts again and again, but still the pigeon outweighs his piled-up flesh. Finally, all his flesh gone, the king gets into the scale himself. The two gods then resume their divine shape, announce to Usinára that for the sacrifice he has made he will be glorified in all worlds throughout eternity, and the king ascends transfigured into heaven.

This legend is repeated under the title _Syena-Kapotiyam_ (Dove and Hawk) in the _Purana Sarvasvan_ in the Bodleian Library, where it is in Bengali characters. There is another version in the _Markandêyâ Purâna_ (ch. iii.), in which Indra appears to the sage Vipulasvan in the form of a large famished bird. Finding that this bird can only be nourished by human flesh, the sage appeals to his sons to give it some of their flesh; and on their refusal he curses them, and tells the bird that after he has performed certain funeral ceremonies his body shall be for its nourishment. Whereupon Indra bids the sage abandon his body only by the power of contemplation, reveals his divine nature, and offers Vipulasvan whatever he may ask.