The Jews were closely linked with the money interests.
Charlemagne had had a weakness for them. Even in later centuries they were protected by German princes, so that the early relationship between Germans and Jews may be called harmonious.
But the qualities that spoke in their favor then were those they shared with the German character, and that was to be their undoing later on. Just like the Germans, they too regarded themselves as the chosen people, they too were predisposed toward assimilation, rapidly taking on the customs of those among whom they lived. They too combined imagination and curiosity with business sense and efficiency. In addition, natural instinct and skill in languages gained them success in the Orient, whence they imported treasures. When a prince sent out a Jewish trader to bring back silver daggers from Byzantium or rare furs from the Caucasus, the trader could be relied upon to return not only with the finest wares, but also with a sheaf of curious tales to be related while an especially fine piece of silk was spread out before the princess as a gift.
And then, suddenly, around the year 1090. there came the first persecutions. As soon as the German burghers discovered their own talents as businessmen they felt a natural jealousy of those who had long before them acquired wealth by trading. Suspicion was first cast on the shrewd competitors as aliens, because that was the easiest course. At the same time the initial enthusiasm for the Crusades offered a welcome pretext. When Godfrey of Bouillon issued the call to fight the enemies of Christ at home first, he kindled the flames of fanaticism with this single slogan, giving those who sought to expropriate the Jews a ready-made pretext.
Nor did the Church take a part. Later when the legend of ritual murder, so called, was invented, both Pope and Emperor, otherwise bitter enemies, spoke out against it. The renewed persecutions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were justified by the allegation that the Jews engaged in usury. Since the first persecutions the Jews had turned to moneylending, gaining certain privileges that lent themselves to usury. The reason was that since the Jews could neither own land nor belong to any guild the king had granted them certain privileges entitling them to practice usury, which went against the Christian doctrines. Even in antiquity the interest rate had risen to 50 per cent; now it passed 60 per cent. On the other hand, the Jews ran the risk that individual debtors might invoke the protection of the bishop to evade repayment. Thus they preferred to grant loans on houses, and through their co-religionists in other lands they soon became an international money power to which emperors and kings, princes and cities were in debt.
On a small scale, many burghers now were also in debt to the Jews. Why not set fire to the houses of the Jews, they asked themselves, thus destroying the irksome debt contracts? Such action might even constitute a good Christian deed! It was fear of such threats that drove the Jews from the country into the cities.
A little later, in 1385, when Emperor Wenceslaus was caught in the struggle between the cities and the nobility, he ordered a great plundering of the Jews in Bohemia and Southern Germany, during which all debt claims were destroyed. Nuremberg alone was enriched by two million gold marks, and other cities grew rich in the same way. The Emperor now knew on which side to find advantage.
Charles IV of Luxemburg headed the movement against the Jews. Then as today, the Jews’ greatest enemy was a pale misanthrope and visionary, seeking to avenge his own wretched childhood and to conquer his sense of inferiority, often found in the depth of the soul of those who persecute the innocent. This time the people, responding to his call, let themselves go in unbridled license. In Spires and Vienna many Jews preferred to burn themselves to death. Certain Rhineland cities, deeply in debt to the Jews, got together and confined hundreds of them in wooden houses on an island in the Rhine which they then put to the torch. The emperor himself presented a certain noblewoman with the house of a Strasbourg Jew.
A certain Alsatian chronicler of the time profoundly formulated the main reason for these and all later sufferings: “Their talent,” he said, “is the poison that kills the Jews.”
8
THOSE WHO regard German history as a tragic love-story in which State and spirit constantly seek and almost never attain each other will find a symbolic date in the thirteenth century—indeed, two such dates. The Interregnum, the period of greatest anarchy, is framed by two of the finest monuments of contemporary art. The foundation stones were laid for the Cologne and Strasbourg Cathedrals.
Like symbols in stone these gray towers rose. And those of Ulm, Trèves and Freiburg, of Bamberg and Naumburg, rise like beacons from the mists of the German Middle Ages in equal beauty; and if the heaven above them is not forever blue, it is heaven none the less. The endeavor of the German soul has found a truly Faustian expression in the pointed arches of the Gothic. This art form came from France where it had found perhaps even more perfect expression. To us it seems that there is no nation to which Gothic art is better adapted than to the Germans; for it is ponderous and yet soaring, dusky and musical, earth-bound and mystic—just as is the German spirit in its manifestations.
How well these early German artists mastered the art of picturing man in images of stone—saints, kings or patrons placed close to the walls, gray against gray, stone images before stone walls! There they still stand today, against the walls of the Bamberg Cathedral—knights who might well have been poets and perhaps were; princes gazing into faraway distances, perhaps to the South; and between them the Sybil with the terribly beautiful head of an Orphic priestess or of a woman possessed. And far away, in Strasbourg, stands that other Sybil, later known by such strange names; and then there is the princely couple of Meissen, placed against the wall of the Naumburg Cathedral.
TWO MEDIEVAL STATUES ON THE CATHEDRAL OF
STRASBOURG
Close by rise the most beautiful structures of all, or at least those most peculiar to the Middle Ages: the town halls in which the citizens manifested their new-found freedom. They hardly dreamed that their descendants six centuries later would still admire their handiwork. We choose as an example the splendid Town Hall of Breslau, in the shadow of which the present author spent his youth. There a dream of grace seems to rise on the solid vaulting, as though a powerful man were carrying a dainty woman across the market place. It stands free in the middle of the main square—called Ring in Silesia—while many another town hall, pressed into narrow streets, overshadowed by tall churches, is unable to unfold its full beauty. The first glimpse of the Breslau hall’s upper part, moreover, is a vivid one. Clay tiles shine down in red, green and white from the roof of the huge center gable. The searching eye finds itself following the irregular lines and windows, which create a sense of freedom, color and mood that spreads delight. Gradually the eye distinguishes the square ground-floor windows of the façade, and above them the Gothic windows of the second floor, one of them built into a graceful lookout, again off-center. Above the large colorful sundial extends the gable masonry—delicate, like Christmas pastry. The architect’s imagination spends itself in the contrast between the tall lower windows of the wings, which are in the Gothic style, and the upper ones, which lean toward the Renaissance, and in a charming corner alcove.
The whole structure is surmounted by an octagonal tower, plain and a little grumpy, looking down with the severity of a schoolmaster on all the antics below, especially on the statues of the drunken man and woman flanking the Ratskeller. But there is one thing that seems to please the glum tower—the curious black column facing the entrance, which once awaited the evildoers who were there publicly flogged and sometimes executed though innocent.
And from the cathedrals and marketplaces, from the town halls and village greens, there sounded music. The German people, who in the Middle Ages revealed themselves in buildings still frequented today, at the same time conquered a second art that lifted them from the obscurity of their daily life into that higher world of the spirit. German song and German poetry had their beginnings, and as so often in the history of the arts, the very dawn of this, their great endowment, burst into bloom of