99857688-Devil-and-the-Jews-the-Medieval-Conception-of-the-Jew

Home | TOC | Index106The Devil and the Jewsof the Jewish communities of Aragon, meeting in Barcelona inDecember, 1354, felt constrained to petition the Pope, with thesupport of the King, to forbid by decree the accusation that theJews had caused whatever plague or famine or other misfortunebefell the people, and the consequent bloody attacks upon them.As though the pope’s decree could abate the now feverish animosityagainst them. In such an atmosphere the rare note ofskepticism voiced by the contemporary Cyriacus Spangenbergin the Mannsfeldischen Chronik certainly went unheard. “In theyear 1349,” he wrote, “God visited His punishment upon the unbelievingobstinate Jews. Whether they poisoned the wellseverywhere, however, I do not know, except that it is incrediblethat the pestilence should in this manner have spread throughEurope, for poison causes not pestilence but certain death.” Yethe did not question the justice of the divinely ordained attacksupon the Jews. It was the irrational justification that offendedhim. 23(It may be mentioned, parenthetically, that an incidentalbyproduct of the calumnies heaped upon the Jews during theBlack Death was Shakespeare’s Shylock. The usurer who demandshis pound of flesh in payment of a debt was a quitefamiliar figure in early medieval tales on the continent, where hehad been imported from Oriental sources. In these early versionshe is a Christian or a heathen; in several instances a Jew is theunfortunate victim of a bloodthirsty Christian creditor. He appearsas a Jew for the first time in Giovanni Fiorentino’s collectionof tales, Pecorone, in 1378. This transformation, it is generallyagreed, probably occurred under the influence of the hystericalabuse which was the Jew’s daily portion since the calamitousevents of a quarter of a century earlier. Thereafter he remaineda Jew in the succeeding accounts—and thus Shakespeare foundand immortalized him. 24 )The habit of blaming Jews for such calamities, once formed,continued to assert itself. As Schudt 25 found himself remarkingwith unwonted sympathy: “It had become almost the fashion toascribe all pestilences to the poor Jews, for when in 1357 a