History of the Jews in the Modern World

The Jew as Non-European A Tremulous Minority In the eighteenth century, a majestic silhouette of battlements and spires greeted the traveler who made his way down the valley of the lower Main River. It was the profile of Frankfurt, one of the four remaining free cities of the Holy Roman Empire, and one of the German world's three most important commercial entrepots. Frankfurt's cobblestoned streets teemed with movement, with shouting hucksters, bawling cattle driven in for sale and slaughter, rattling vegetable carts pushed along to market, paunchy burghers and weather-beaten farmers arguing the cost and quality of produce. But as the traveler continued down the main Sachsenhauser Bridge into the city's principal business center, pausing occasionally to sample the wares in shops and pavilions, stalls and warehouses, he found his way barred by the Borheimertor, a large wooden gate demarcating still another townlet within the larger urban area, a ganglion of twisting alleys, ramshackle storefronts and cramped apartment structures. The gate's solitary entrance, guarded by an armed warden, suggested that a prison community may have been locked inside. The notion was not entirely far-fetched. The little enclosure was the Judengasse, the ghetto of the Jews. The ghetto of Frankfurt-am-Main, and comparable enclaves in scores of other towns and cities throughout West-Central Europe, evinced a central fact of Jewish life well into the Modern Era. This was the Jews' indeterminate status as non-Europeans. It is fair to speculate, then, whether the Jews were foreigners or interlopers. Were they voluntary immigrants newly arrived from other lands or continents? Or had they been transported to Europe as captives, as African slaves had been imported to the New World? None of these descriptions would have been apt. The Jews were neither recent slaves nor recent immigrants. Most, rather, were descended from ancestors who had lived on European soil for many hundreds of years, in some instances as far back as the Roman Empire. In the German world, their settlement traced back at least to the eleventh century, and in Frankfurt itself to the twelfth century, when some two hundred Jews took up residence in the squalid little encinture beyond the Borheimertor. Even this initial settlement in Frankfurt was intermittently curtailed. In the fourteenth century, the city's inhabitants, and those of other German communities, were ravaged by the bubonic plague. Afterward, it became the custom to attribute the "Black Death" to the Jews, the "wizards," the "devils," who had survived the epidemic in inexplicably greater numbers than their neighbors (possibly owing to Judaic hygienic regulations). In their fear and rage, local populations in ensuing years hurled themselves into a succession of anti-Jewish massacres. Those Jews who escaped Christian mobs fled eastward, most of them ultimately to settle in Polish and other Slavic territories (p. 9ff.). In the sixteenth century, small numbers of Jews ventured a return to Central Europe. Their reception was not congenialnot in an age of religious turmoil. This time, they encountered the animus of Protestant Reformers and Catholic Counter-Reformers alike. The obloquy that attached to their presence was revealed in an obscene sixteenth-century graffito carved into Frankfurt's ghetto wall. It revealed a trio of Jews debasing themselves around a sow. As one Jew suckled at the animal's teats, another (in rabbinical garb) lifted the Judensau's tail, allowing the third (also a rabbi) to drink the animal's excrement. Several feet higher on the ghetto wall an even more repellent carving appeared, this one of a dead baby, its body punSachar, Howard Morley is the author of 'History of the Jews in the Modern World ', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400030972 and ISBN 1400030978.