The story resumes in the new millennium, at which point the Jews were primarily city and town dwellers, and their population had dropped to probably one to one-and-a-half million. Their importance in both the Christian and Muslim worlds lay in their being the most literate and numerate, and thus essential to facilitating trade. That said, they continued to be subject to random acts of prejudice and violence on both sides of the religious divide. “One can see medieval Judaism as essentially a system designed to hold Jewish communities together in the face of many perils.”
A new type of anti-Semitism, born of the Jews’ wealth and the writings of scholars who wondered why they rejected Jesus, arose and blossomed at the time of the Crusades. Jewish communities were attacked throughout Europe and again during the following centuries of heretical suppression by the Church. The 14th-century Black Death added another layer “to the anti-Semitic superstructure.” The safest place in Latin Europe for Jews was Spain, home for centuries to Europe’s largest Jewish community. Their world succumbed to the Dominican-led Inquisition, which culminated in the expulsion of the Spanish Jews in 1492. Their destruction “was the most momentous event in Jewish history since the mid-2nd century.”
In 1515, Venice became the first community to confine its Jews to a segregated area—a ghetto. However, the Jews of Venice thrived because there was a constancy and certainty to their lives. The rise of the world economy and the growth of international trade greatly enhanced the status of Jewish bankers and traders throughout the 15th and later centuries. The states that had expelled them soon welcomed them back. Jews financed the Habsburgs in their two great 17th-century confrontations—the defeat of the Moors at Vienna and the halting of Louis XIV’s expansionist ambitions. In England, for the first time since the Roman Empire, Jews were allowed something approximating normal citizenship. They prospered in the American colonies, where there were few laws based on religion, and they came to dominate the financial infrastructure of 18th-century London.
In the 19th century, two Jewish boys were baptized into Christian faiths. Heinrich Heine said that “baptism was the entrance ticket to European culture.” They were Benjamin Disraeli of London and Karl Marx of Trier. A quarter of a million European Jews would follow. Disraeli went on to the British Commons and eventually became prime minister. He supported the liberalization of British society, in which Jews would rise to the top of a meritocracy. Throughout the continent, one country after another granted its Jewish citizens full rights.
Marx, however, was fiercely anti-Semitic and condemned capitalism as the religion of money. Although Disraeli opined that Jews were natural Tories, Marx’s socialism appealed to the Jews of Europe. As their numbers grew, the Jews of central and eastern Europe moved further left. When Poland was partitioned, Jews became part of the Russian Empire for the first time and were treated as unacceptable aliens. Pogroms followed in the second half of the century. The world of Russian oppression led to the Zionist movement, which sought a Jewish place in the Holy Land.
At about the same time, France was convulsed by the Dreyfus Affair. Although Dreyfus ultimately prevailed over the trumped-up charges, anti-Semitism took firm hold in the Third Republic. As the century in which Jews made vast strides came to a close, they still remained surrounded by suspicion and disdain. Ironically, many of the Jews of Germany believed “that Germany was the ideal place for Jewish talents.”
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