Heritage: Civilization and the Jews #105; No. 105; The Search For Deliverance

<v Speaker>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H. <v Speaker>Revson Foundation, Petree Stores Corporation and the National <v Speaker>Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding has been provided by the following <v Speaker>contributors. <v Speaker>A complete donor list is available at W NE T. <v Speaker>Who is the father who raises his children only to take vengeance on them

<v Speaker>with great and fuming wrath? <v Speaker>We have sat on the ground. <v Speaker>We have also wept. <v Speaker>Fourteen ninety two a year of bitter ironies. <v Speaker>On the day set aside in the Jewish calendar for mourning the destruction of the Jewish <v Speaker>temple by Rome. <v Speaker>Centuries before the last Jewish refugees set sail <v Speaker>from Spain. <v Speaker>On the very next day, another ship set sail from a Spanish harbor. <v Speaker>This one commanded by Christopher Columbus. <v Speaker>A door was opening onto a new world for Europe, but all the doors seemed <v Speaker>to be closing for the Jews. <v Speaker>Your brothers went as exiles from Jerez and Seville.

<v Speaker>I saw their stubbornness. <v Speaker>I brought on the expulsion from Castiel and Sicily. <v Speaker>Aragon, Granada. My children. <v Speaker>I took you from the Holy Land as exiles into bondage. <v Speaker>I saw your stubbornness. <v Speaker>You did not heed Isaiah or Jeremiah. <v Speaker>Therefore, I had not mercy on you, my children. <v Speaker>Fourteen ninety two was a tragic year for the Jews of Spain. <v Speaker>King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, under the pressure of their adviser Thomas <v Speaker>de Torquemada ordered all Jews to leave the kingdom within four months on pain <v Speaker>of death. The glorious institutions of Spanish jury like this <v Speaker>great synagogue at Toledo. <v Speaker>Now Santa Maria, La Blanka were doomed. <v Speaker>Now, expulsion was not a new experience for the Jews of Europe. <v Speaker>Jews had been expelled from England, France and many a town in Germany during the <v Speaker>preceding five centuries.

<v Speaker>But those events had nothing like the dramatic effects that marked the expulsion <v Speaker>of the Jews from Spain. <v Speaker>Jews had never made themselves at home anywhere more deeply or intimately than <v Speaker>in Spain. Their creativity had flowed in every direction. <v Speaker>There had been 150000 or more in numbers. <v Speaker>One out of every 10 Spaniards had been Jewish or of Jewish origin. <v Speaker>And now this Jewish community, the largest and most prosperous in the world, <v Speaker>was doomed to destruction by a single stroke of the pen. <v Speaker>The traumatic effects were not felt by the Jews of Spain alone. <v Speaker>No events since the destruction of Judea by the Romans 14th centuries before <v Speaker>had so shaken the security of Jews everywhere or brought them to so sharp <v Speaker>a realization of their exile and their vulnerability. <v Speaker>Men, women and children, aristocrats and common laborers alike.

<v Speaker>Hundred and fifty thousand Jews displaced and homeless. <v Speaker>With the exception of a few cities in Italy, Western Europe was closed <v Speaker>to the refugees. They were forbidden even to cross its territory. <v Speaker>But. <v Speaker>A law. <v Speaker>They fled to the Ottoman Empire, to the Muslim lands of the eastern Mediterranean <v Speaker>and North Africa. <v Speaker>They settled in the Jewish communities of these lands and they prosper. <v Speaker>But wherever they went to Morocco, to Istanbul, to Italy or to the eastern <v Speaker>Mediterranean, the Jews of Spain carried with them a burden of sorrow <v Speaker>that no material well-being could relieve <v Speaker>the fate of the refugees from Spain, stirred within the Jewish heart and mind

<v Speaker>a profound self-examination. <v Speaker>It forced upon Jews everywhere a deep sense of exile, <v Speaker>and they reached for ways to redefine their place in the world. <v Speaker>We need. <v Speaker>In the years following the expulsion from Spain, a new understanding of Jewish <v Speaker>existence would emerge in a village in the Ottoman province of Palestine. <v Speaker>He who saw soffit 10 years ago and observes it, now <v Speaker>has the impression of a miracle. <v Speaker>For more Jews are arriving here continually, hatred of the Jews <v Speaker>is unknown here, and the Turks hold them in esteem. <v Speaker>Saffet was at first little more than a village standing near the graves <v Speaker>of the revered Jewish sages.

<v Speaker>Hillel and Shammy. <v Speaker>Now it became a center of Jewish mysticism. <v Speaker>In their search for an explanation of the meaning of Jewish existence. <v Speaker>Scholars from many lands came to worship and study the sacred texts <v Speaker>of Judaism. <v Speaker>In the books they studied lies the key to their mystical vision. <v Speaker>The Missioner, the Talmud and the Midrash hymn were books traditionally <v Speaker>studied by Jews everywhere for the previous thousand years. <v Speaker>But the Zohar the Zohar was different. <v Speaker>It was called The Book of Splendor. <v Speaker>The Book of Radiance. <v Speaker>It was enigmatic and mysterious. <v Speaker>It was at the heart of a world of ideas known as the Kabbalah. <v Speaker>In Safford, the Kaballah would take a place in the forefront of Jewish thinking.

<v Speaker>The greatest of the mystical scholars of suffered was the Rabbi, Isaac <v Speaker>Luria. <v Speaker>He saw spirits everywhere and heard their whispers in the rushing of the water, <v Speaker>in the movements of the trees and grass. <v Speaker>In the song or twittering of the birds, even in the flickering <v Speaker>flames. <v Speaker>I found in the Cabala a mystical explanation for the condition <v Speaker>of the Jews. It was not just the Jewish people who were in exile. <v Speaker>The whole world. Even God himself was in exile. <v Speaker>Gloria taught that there had been an accident before the creation of the universe. <v Speaker>Part of the divine spirit in the form of celestial spox had <v Speaker>been scattered and lost for the Divine Spirit to be made

<v Speaker>whole again. The scattered spox would have to be recovered. <v Speaker>According to Loria, the Jews had a special role in this cosmic drama. <v Speaker>If every Jew were to obey the commandments of God in every action, <v Speaker>no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, the sparks would be recovered. <v Speaker>The world restored to holiness and the people of Israel redeemed. <v Speaker>While the Jews of Stafford studied and prayed and waited for the restoration <v Speaker>of the world across the Mediterranean, another sort of restoration <v Speaker>was taking place. <v Speaker>In Venice and in other cities of northern Italy, the late Middle Ages <v Speaker>have brought a rebirth of trade and commerce unmatched in Europe since <v Speaker>the days of the Roman Empire.

<v Speaker>I see vessels as big as any mansion that masts taller <v Speaker>than its towers. They are as mountains floating on the waters. <v Speaker>They go to face incalculable dangers in every portion of the globe. <v Speaker>They bear wine to England. <v Speaker>Honey to Russia. Saffron oil and linen to Syria, <v Speaker>Armenia, Persia and Araby. <v Speaker>They return heavily laden with products of all kinds which are sent <v Speaker>hence to every part of the world. <v Speaker>Great sums were needed to finance this commerce in Venice, a group <v Speaker>of men began to specialize in gathering the money necessary for such <v Speaker>investments.

<v Speaker>Seated on benches had their exchange tables, these early capitalists <v Speaker>came to be known as bench men. <v Speaker>Keary in Italian bankers. <v Speaker>The rise of a money economy meant a new respectability for merchants, traders <v Speaker>and financiers. The Jews who practiced these trades would share <v Speaker>in this new acceptability. <v Speaker>The Middle Ages were coming to a close. <v Speaker>Across all of Italy, the new merchant class came to power. <v Speaker>They broke away from the pious conventions of medieval society and found <v Speaker>in the culture of ancient Rome and Greece an inspiration for the world. <v Speaker>They would now create.

<v Speaker>They called it a rebirth, a renaissance in their desire <v Speaker>to rediscover the achievements of the past. <v Speaker>The men of the Renaissance studied Greek and even Hebrew texts <v Speaker>in their painting and sculpture. They portrayed mythological and biblical subjects. <v Speaker>It seems that the thousand years since the fall of Rome had been nothing but a sojourn <v Speaker>in darkness and ignorance. <v Speaker>For the men of the Renaissance, wisdom was to be found in the classical world. <v Speaker>When evening comes, I return home and go into my library. <v Speaker>I dress myself as though I were to appear before a royal court. <v Speaker>As a Florentine envoy, then decently attired, I <v Speaker>enter the courts of the great men of antiquity. <v Speaker>They receive me with friendship.

<v Speaker>For for a long and happy hours, I lose myself in them. <v Speaker>I forget all my troubles. <v Speaker>I'm not afraid of poverty or death. <v Speaker>I transform myself entirely in their likeness. <v Speaker>The rediscovery of ancient literature and the desire among growing numbers <v Speaker>of people for books to read were spurred on by an invention <v Speaker>printing with movable type. <v Speaker>Books once rare and costly, some of which, incidentally, were in Hebrew, <v Speaker>were now being published in all the major cities of that day, a generation <v Speaker>of scholars began to examine the world around them with new eyes. <v Speaker>In the early 50s and hundreds, a Polish doctor, Nikolai Copernicus, <v Speaker>was working to simplify the mathematics that described the motion of heavenly

<v Speaker>bodies. He came to a shocking conclusion. <v Speaker>The sun and Stars did not revolve about the Earth. <v Speaker>The earth was not the center of the universe. <v Speaker>Co-parenting would be remembered by the Latin form of his name, Copernicus. <v Speaker>What he started was no less than a revolution. <v Speaker>Others followed in his footsteps. <v Speaker>Taeko Brai your handiest. Kepler Galileo. <v Speaker>It was a time of vast upheavals in man's understanding of himself and his <v Speaker>world. Medieval doctrines that had been cherished and preserved for <v Speaker>centuries were being threatened on all sides. <v Speaker>I believe and neither pope nor councils alone. <v Speaker>For it is perfectly well established that they have frequently aired as well as

<v Speaker>contradicted themselves. <v Speaker>I must be bound by those scriptures which have been brought forward by me. <v Speaker>Yes, my conscience has been taken captive by these words of God. <v Speaker>Here I stand. <v Speaker>I cannot do otherwise. <v Speaker>God help me. <v Speaker>A few years before Copernicus had come to his radical conclusions, Martin <v Speaker>Luther, a young German priest angered by what he saw as corruption <v Speaker>within the church, launched a one man crusade that would rocket to its foundations. <v Speaker>Over the years that followed, Luther moved further and further away from the church <v Speaker>and his beliefs throughout Europe. <v Speaker>Others began to break away from the church in fifteen thirty seven. <v Speaker>Henry, the eighth, declared the Church of England, independent of Rome.

<v Speaker>Four years later, in Geneva, the preacher John Kalvin set up his own <v Speaker>church with beliefs that differed dramatically from traditional Christian <v Speaker>doctrine. <v Speaker>For the first time since its founding, the church in Rome was unable to suppress <v Speaker>a major, heretical movement. <v Speaker>The unity of Christian faith in the West, although often fragile, had lasted <v Speaker>for almost a thousand years. <v Speaker>Now, in a little more than two decades, it was rent asunder forever. <v Speaker>We have been informed that in Rome and elsewhere, the shamelessness of the Jews <v Speaker>is such that they presume to dwell among Christians in the neighborhood of churches <v Speaker>and even to rent houses in the more elegant streets and squares of the cities. <v Speaker>The reaction of the church to Martin Luther's Protestant rebellion was disastrous

<v Speaker>for the Jews. The church was determined to stamp out deviation <v Speaker>and heresy of every kind, and Jews, like Protestants, were regarded as <v Speaker>a threat. Indeed, ironically, Jews were regarded and considered as <v Speaker>the allies of the Protestant Reformation. <v Speaker>So in 15 53, the papacy endorsed the burning of the Talmud, <v Speaker>imposed a censorship on Jewish texts and in 15 55. <v Speaker>Pope Paul the fourth, revived the segregationist policies of the church <v Speaker>and ordered the Jews of Rome into a ghetto. <v Speaker>Ghetto deprivation, isolation, separation <v Speaker>across the centuries, the word ghetto came to mean the segregation of any people. <v Speaker>But originally the word ghetto was a Phoenician word, meaning iron foundry.

<v Speaker>The new meaning of ghetto was created here in Venice some 40 <v Speaker>years before Pope Paul issued his encyclical. <v Speaker>Once upon a time, there was an iron foundry in this place, but at a specific <v Speaker>date to be exact. March 15 16, it was decreed that the Jews <v Speaker>of Venice could live only in this place, surrounded by a wall. <v Speaker>Closed in at night by a gate that was shot at sunset. <v Speaker>It was not at first a place of deprivation or persecution. <v Speaker>The intent of the Venetians was perhaps only to limit Jewish competition <v Speaker>with their own commercial activities. But this ghetto set the pattern that was soon <v Speaker>followed by city after city throughout Italy and eventually

<v Speaker>by cities across all of Europe. <v Speaker>It's very hard to paint the reality of ghetto life, the social or the intellectual <v Speaker>reality in one single color. <v Speaker>Yes, the Jews were separated geographically from their neighbors, but there was a <v Speaker>great deal of intermingling with non-Jews on the social level. <v Speaker>There were periods of repression and persecution, but there were also periods of <v Speaker>relative toleration. <v Speaker>And if in some places the ghetto had a stunting effect on intellectual life <v Speaker>in others, and especially here in the ghetto of Venice, there was a vibrant <v Speaker>social and religious life. <v Speaker>And so we find Jewish composers like Solomon Rossi composing music <v Speaker>for the synagogue in the Renaissance style. <v Speaker>And so we find Jewish poets like Sadat Copy or Sullum, whose fame transcended <v Speaker>the limits of the ghetto.

<v Speaker>Is not that the Jews were free from disabilities. <v Speaker>The dark side of life was never far away. <v Speaker>But for a brief spasm of time, something of the brilliance and glitter of the Renaissance <v Speaker>illuminated the life of the Jews. <v Speaker>Dynamism up there in their source past now to the nations along the Atlantic <v Speaker>Coast. <v Speaker>The opening of shipping routes to the Orient and the new world had made Catholic Spain <v Speaker>the most powerful kingdom of Europe, possessing vast territories in <v Speaker>the new world. Spain and Portugal monopolized the Atlantic trade <v Speaker>routes. <v Speaker>In 15 56, as part of a royal inheritance, the Spanish <v Speaker>crown came into possession of the Netherlands, one of the most thoroughly Protestant <v Speaker>regions of Europe.

<v Speaker>In Spain, for 60 years since the expulsion of the Jews, the Spanish <v Speaker>rulers have waged a bloody campaign to root out all vestiges of Jewish <v Speaker>and Islamic worship among their subjects. <v Speaker>The Spanish Inquisition had tortured and burned at the stake. <v Speaker>Thousands suspected of deviating, however slightly, from strict <v Speaker>Catholic orthodoxy. <v Speaker>Now, with the Netherlands under Spanish rule, the Spanish Inquisition <v Speaker>would deal with the Dutch. <v Speaker>The Netherlands rose in revolt. <v Speaker>Protestant England and its Queen Elizabeth came to their aid. <v Speaker>The battle lines were drawn. <v Speaker>Elizabeth and the Protestant lands on one side. <v Speaker>The grim and zealous monarch of Spain. <v Speaker>Philip the second. And the Catholics on the other. <v Speaker>Before permitting religion to be weakened, I would lose all my dominions and

<v Speaker>our hundred lives if I had them, for I will never be a ruler <v Speaker>of heretics. <v Speaker>I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart <v Speaker>and stomach of a king and a king of England, too. <v Speaker>And think for a second that Spain or any prince of Europe <v Speaker>should dare to invade the borders of my realm. <v Speaker>Spain's attack when it came was massive. <v Speaker>A fleet of greater proportions than the world had ever seen. <v Speaker>It was called the Catholic Armada. <v Speaker>The English under Sir Francis Drake sailed out to meet it. <v Speaker>When the two fleets met, a lighter and swifter ships of the English quickly <v Speaker>outmaneuvered the armada and broke off its formation. <v Speaker>The defeat of the Spanish Armada did not end the struggle between Spain

<v Speaker>and the Protestants of Europe, but it was a crucial turning point. <v Speaker>The Atlantic was no longer a Spanish sea. <v Speaker>The Protestant low countries achieved their independence <v Speaker>and with it the right they had so boldly proclaimed when they joined in rebellion. <v Speaker>Where it concerns matters of religion, Holland and Zeeland shall conduct themselves <v Speaker>as they think proper, provided that every individual remains free <v Speaker>in his religion and that no man shall be molested or questioned on the subject <v Speaker>of divine worship. <v Speaker>Amsterdam, once a little more than a minor port on the North Sea, <v Speaker>welcomed refugees from religious intolerance all over Europe. <v Speaker>Protestant merchants came from Flanders, Huguenots from France, <v Speaker>Jews from Spain and Portugal.

<v Speaker>The city grew into the trade capital of northern Europe. <v Speaker>Spices, textiles, goods of all sorts crowded the docks of <v Speaker>Amsterdam. Its ships went forth in search of trade routes <v Speaker>everywhere. <v Speaker>The Dutch flag was raised over lands in the distant Orient and in Africa <v Speaker>and in the new world, its merchants gathered fortunes. <v Speaker>The Jewish exiles from Spain and Portugal had found a home in Europe <v Speaker>where they could live with few restrictions. <v Speaker>Here in 16 16, a rabbi could write. <v Speaker>Today, the people are living peacefully in Amsterdam. <v Speaker>They have made laws and rules among them, which are called freedom of religion to all.

<v Speaker>Everyone is permitted to live according to his creed. <v Speaker>However, he is not to make it publicly apparent that he belongs to a religion <v Speaker>different from that of the rest of the city's inhabitants. <v Speaker>A synagogue or a Catholic church would be discreetly hidden from view. <v Speaker>Like this church in the attic of an Amsterdam mansion. <v Speaker>Over the years, Amsterdam's respect for diversity and dissent <v Speaker>grew to allow public worship by foes of all faiths. <v Speaker>The Jews came to call it the New Jerusalem <v Speaker>at the dedication ceremony of this majestic building. <v Speaker>There was a choir and an orchestra. <v Speaker>This reflected the taste, the culture and the practice of the Spanish and Portuguese <v Speaker>Jews who founded this community and who built this synagogue.

<v Speaker>They had been Mariano's Jews who in Spain and Portugal <v Speaker>had outwardly accepted the forms and ritual of Christianity who pretended <v Speaker>to be Christians in order to avoid the cruelties of the Inquisition, <v Speaker>but who maintained their fidelity to the Jewish faith and the Jewish tradition, <v Speaker>and who secretly practiced that faith and made their allegiance <v Speaker>to that tradition. <v Speaker>For several generations in Spain and Portugal, the Mariano's endured <v Speaker>hiding their Jewish identity. <v Speaker>In Amsterdam, they would reshape their lives. <v Speaker>But the very conditions in Amsterdam that allowed for freedom

<v Speaker>of worship also allowed individuals to challenge the Jewish community <v Speaker>from within. <v Speaker>I take a totally different view of God and nature. <v Speaker>I say all is in God. <v Speaker>Baruch Spinoza was an exception in the world of Amsterdam, Drew. <v Speaker>The sound of a Portuguese Murano, he had studied Descartes <v Speaker>and others of the new philosophers, although gentle and unassuming. <v Speaker>He shocked Jews and Christians alike by questioning the truth of miracles, <v Speaker>treating the Bible as a historical document and denying the accepted <v Speaker>idea of God. <v Speaker>A new orders of the Synagogues Governing Council make it known that they have long <v Speaker>since been cognizant of the wrong opinions and behavior of Baruch <v Speaker>Espinosa. I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber <v Speaker>of established religion.

<v Speaker>We excommunicate expell and curse and dam <v Speaker>Baruch Spinoza. <v Speaker>Cursed be he by day. <v Speaker>And cursed be he by night. <v Speaker>Cursed be he when he lies down and cursed <v Speaker>be he. When he rises up. <v Speaker>We order that nobody should communicate with him orally <v Speaker>or in writing or show him any favor or stay with him <v Speaker>under the same roof or come within four cubits of him <v Speaker>or read anything composed or written by him. <v Speaker>Unshaken Spinoza continued to study and write in solitude. <v Speaker>He had alarmed his contemporaries with his view that God and nature were one <v Speaker>and could be understood by reason. <v Speaker>They accused him of atheism, but later generations would recognize <v Speaker>in his writings a foundation of modern philosophy and see

<v Speaker>him as a God intoxicated man. <v Speaker>The Jews who first came to Amsterdam were called Sephardim. <v Speaker>Those of Spanish and Portuguese background, but it was not long before another group <v Speaker>began to arrive. The Ashkenazim Jews from Poland, <v Speaker>Lithuania and Germany. <v Speaker>The experience of these Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of northern Europe, often <v Speaker>had been bitter. <v Speaker>The Middle Ages had been a time of unending trial. <v Speaker>But they continued to lead a precarious existence in scattered communities <v Speaker>throughout Germany and Central Europe.

<v Speaker>In the city of Prague in Bohemia, caravans were assembled to carry <v Speaker>manufactured goods to Russia. <v Speaker>Other caravans returning from the east unloaded their cargo of Russian grain, <v Speaker>lumber and cattle for shipment to the west <v Speaker>here. <v Speaker>Here for centuries, Jews mingled with Christians in the market places in the 13th <v Speaker>century. They built this synagogue. <v Speaker>It is called the Altneushul. <v Speaker>The old new synagogue. <v Speaker>And it alone among the synagogues of medieval Europe survives to this day, <v Speaker>a reminder of the antiquity of Jewish settlement in the land. <v Speaker>The world of the Ashkenazim was unlike that of the Spanish Jews in many ways.

<v Speaker>In Spain, Jews had felt that they were Spanish at least as much as they were Jewish. <v Speaker>But in northern Europe, constant tension between the Jews and Christians from <v Speaker>the 10th century onward had closed the Jews within their own society. <v Speaker>But not all us. <v Speaker>I no matter how slowly long. <v Speaker>As much as possible, the Ashkenazi community sought to be self-sufficient. <v Speaker>A world apart. <v Speaker>The Jewish quarter within the city was a town within a town. <v Speaker>Jews had their own internal government, their own courts, their own schools <v Speaker>and guilds. <v Speaker>They cared for each other in times of hardship, trying not to depend upon the Christian <v Speaker>world around them. Oh, and though over the years <v Speaker>they were influenced by the dress, the speech and the customs of their Christian

<v Speaker>neighbors at heart, they remained fiercely loyal to their Jewishness <v Speaker>and resistant to any change in their way of life. <v Speaker>Oh, you've been so long. <v Speaker>Been your name. <v Speaker>Blessed art thou. Oh, Lord, our God. <v Speaker>King of the Universe, who has made a distinction between the sacred and the profane, <v Speaker>between light and darkness, between Israel and the other nations, <v Speaker>between the seventh day and the six working days. <v Speaker>Blessed, aren't they, will Lord, who has made a distinction between the sacred and the <v Speaker>profane. <v Speaker>In the late 15th century, large numbers of German Jews arrived in Poland. <v Speaker>In many senses, Poland was still a frontier, its farming system

<v Speaker>was primitive and feudal. <v Speaker>The Polish nobles realized that greater profits could be made if the lands <v Speaker>produced more efficiently. <v Speaker>The nobles turned to the Jews. <v Speaker>We do hereby lease to the worthy Master Abraham. <v Speaker>Son of Samuel. <v Speaker>Our estates, villages and towns and the monetary payments <v Speaker>that come from the tax on grain, beehives, fish ponds, lakes <v Speaker>and places of beaver hunting, on fields, on meadows, on forests <v Speaker>and on threshing floors. <v Speaker>We also give him the authority to judge and sentence all our subjects <v Speaker>to punish by money, fines or by sentence of death. <v Speaker>Those who are guilty or who disobey. <v Speaker>The Jews who leads to the lands from the nobles were called our $N <v Speaker>and they enlisted other Jews to help them administer those vast domain's

<v Speaker>goods that were produced were turned over to Jewish merchants for sale <v Speaker>in this new land of opportunity. <v Speaker>Jews became innkeepers, traders, artisans and financial agents. <v Speaker>All the Jews benefited. <v Speaker>The Jewish community of Poland grew to be the largest in the world. <v Speaker>This people who had come from Germany found in Poland a land on a crossroads <v Speaker>between Europe and the Orient. <v Speaker>And from its culture, they relearned elements of an Eastern heritage and created <v Speaker>a blending of east and West that was uniquely theirs. <v Speaker>It is with a sort of painful foreboding that we look back on the period of greatest

<v Speaker>prosperity for the Polish Jews. <v Speaker>In Lvov, in Lublin, and particularly in Krakoff, the Jews <v Speaker>have an almost every brick house. <v Speaker>Five, ten, fifteen or sixteen shops. <v Speaker>We are tired of tolerating the growing audacity of the Jews, not <v Speaker>satisfied with engaging in occupations, interfering with the livelihood of Christians. <v Speaker>They raise their heads as enemies of Christian religion. <v Speaker>The mixture of economic competition and religious tension had always proved <v Speaker>dangerous. The Jewish Governing Council's soon realized the <v Speaker>peril of their situation in all Jewish communities dwelling <v Speaker>in and near the cities. <v Speaker>The elders should warn their members to be careful, neither to ridicule <v Speaker>nor to assault any gentile.

<v Speaker>We all see that the bitter exile is getting more and more intense. <v Speaker>In 15 sixty Poland, next to the Ukraine, huge regions <v Speaker>of wilderness were brought under Polish rule. <v Speaker>Our $N and other Jews were sent in to colonize these territories. <v Speaker>Ukrainians were members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. <v Speaker>Their language and culture distinct from that of the Polish rulers. <v Speaker>They hated the Poles with their Roman Catholic priests and their Jewish Randers. <v Speaker>In 16 47 bogged down netsky, a Ukrainian

<v Speaker>Kazakh chieftain called upon the peasants of his land to rise <v Speaker>against their Polish masters. <v Speaker>Cossacks and peasants swept across the Ukraine burst unchecked <v Speaker>into Poland, burning, looting and nightly. <v Speaker>Some were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to dogs. <v Speaker>Some had their hands and limbs chopped off and their bodies thrown on the highway <v Speaker>to be crushed by wagons and trampled by horses. <v Speaker>The enemies slaughtered infants in the collapse of their mothers. <v Speaker>When it was over Warsaw, Cracow, the great cities and towns were decimated. <v Speaker>The Kazakhs had been followed by the Russians and then the Swedes.

<v Speaker>What had started as a rebellion had ended as a deluge. <v Speaker>The Jewish dead numbered at least a hundred thousand. <v Speaker>Many thousands more had been taken captive and sold into slavery <v Speaker>throughout the world of Judaism. <v Speaker>There was shock, shock at the fate of the Polish victims. <v Speaker>Shock. The recurring pattern of violence to which Jews everywhere was subject <v Speaker>the turmoil and violence of the times seemed proof that the end of days <v Speaker>was near. <v Speaker>Jewish tradition had promised redemption at the end of days, had promised a time <v Speaker>when the Messiah would come to restore the world to holiness and redeem the nation. <v Speaker>The Jews waited, and they hoped <v Speaker>in sixteen sixty five, when the massacres in Poland were almost ending. <v Speaker>Tights V, a Turkish Jew, proclaimed that he was the Messiah. <v Speaker>The word spread like wildfire.

<v Speaker>Everybody talked about having seen a pillar of fire. <v Speaker>To one had appeared at noontime. <v Speaker>To another at night. <v Speaker>Torchlight processions would move through the city to cries of Long live the <v Speaker>messianic king. Long live schupp takes V. <v Speaker>There had been many messianic pretenders in the past, but never before had one man <v Speaker>who knighted the Jewish people of all lands in a movement so inspired <v Speaker>with enthusiasm and hope. <v Speaker>It is not to the person of schupp tight SFE that we must look for an explanation <v Speaker>of this outpouring of emotion. <v Speaker>Most Jews had never seen him and had little direct knowledge of him. <v Speaker>Rather, we must look to the Jewish people themselves. <v Speaker>And see the move as point of testimony to their deep longing for an end to <v Speaker>suffering and then to sixteen hundred years of exile, <v Speaker>my good father in law left his home in Haman, abandoned his house and

<v Speaker>lands and all his goodly furniture he sent on to us in Hamburg to <v Speaker>enormous casks packed with linens and with every manner of food <v Speaker>that would keep for the old man expected to sail any moment <v Speaker>from Hamburg to the Holy Land. <v Speaker>No Jew attended to business. <v Speaker>Shops were closed. <v Speaker>People kept themselves in readiness for the moment when the Messiah would announce the <v Speaker>end. <v Speaker>As commerce came to a halt, the authorities of the Ottoman Empire grew alarmed. <v Speaker>They ordered schupp fee arrested and gave him the choice of converting <v Speaker>to Islam or dying. <v Speaker>He chose to convert. <v Speaker>He assumed the name Ozzies Mohamed Effendi and accepted a government <v Speaker>pension of 950 piastres a day. <v Speaker>Sharp tights fees, betrayal seemed to mock the deepest hopes of the Jewish people.

<v Speaker>Dear God and king. <v Speaker>Throughout the world, thy servants and children rent themselves with repentance, <v Speaker>prayer and charity. <v Speaker>For too gay for three years, my beloved people, Israel sat <v Speaker>in labor. <v Speaker>But there came forth. Not but when. <v Speaker>If they had believed that a miracle would bring them back together as a nation would <v Speaker>redeem them from their scattered existence. <v Speaker>When the miracle failed, there was nothing left but despair. <v Speaker>In Poland, in the wake of physical ruin, there was now spiritual desolation. <v Speaker>In the early 18th century, a man left his home in the Polish Ukraine <v Speaker>and went into the mountains to meditate on the condition of his world.

<v Speaker>He was known as the Battle Shem Tov, the master of the good name. <v Speaker>The inspiration that he found would revitalize the Judaism of Eastern Europe <v Speaker>through a movement known as Hussie Desson. <v Speaker>Unlike the rabbis of his day, he believed that even a simple and learned man <v Speaker>could approach God directly through prayer and worship. <v Speaker>And in coming closer to God, a man could bring divine influence through himself <v Speaker>into the world. <v Speaker>Leaving to God, it was cool. <v Speaker>It was a joyous, ecstatic experience and the path to it were many <v Speaker>through prayer, through the keeping of any commandment, <v Speaker>even through so simple an action as the tying of one's shoelaces. <v Speaker>God was everywhere and everywhere to be found. <v Speaker>Followers of hotseat wisdom appeared throughout Poland and Lithuania among the poor

<v Speaker>who felt that the traditional community had failed them. <v Speaker>In the years following, the death of the ball shipped of pacifism became <v Speaker>a way of life for tens of thousands. <v Speaker>Many traditional rabbis saw the movement as a threat to their authority. <v Speaker>Their reaction was swift. <v Speaker>Worthless and wanton men who call themselves cursed him have deserted the <v Speaker>Jewish group. They worship in a most insane fashion, which does not conform <v Speaker>to the religion of the Holy Torah. <v Speaker>It is said that a scholar once asked the balls shipped off. <v Speaker>What of the rabbis who call your teachings false? <v Speaker>I'm warning Steve is giving the customer the most companies about, Shanteau <v Speaker>answered. There was a wedding festival in a house selling guitars. <v Speaker>The musicians played in a corner while the guests danced, and the house was <v Speaker>filled with music and joy because they got a deaf man passed by <v Speaker>outside the house. Give me the piece.

<v Speaker>He looked in through the window and saw people whirling about the room <v Speaker>to see how they throw themselves about. <v Speaker>He cried. The house is filled with a madman to get them for <v Speaker>him. He could not hear the music to which they danced. <v Speaker>Gets the spread of hussie desson was not to be Stehn, <v Speaker>the Jews of Eastern Europe weakened and demoralized, found in its the joy <v Speaker>and hope they needed to continue. <v Speaker>While in Eastern Europe, Jews were turning to how citizens in the West

<v Speaker>Judaism would find a different direction. <v Speaker>In the Netherlands, in England and in France and Germany, the early 18th century <v Speaker>saw unprecedented growth in trade and commerce. <v Speaker>And with it, a new attitude toward the Jews. <v Speaker>In 1712, an item appeared in The Spectator, a respected English <v Speaker>periodical. <v Speaker>The Jews are so disseminated through all the trading parts of the world that <v Speaker>they are become the instruments by which the most distant nations converse with one <v Speaker>another. <v Speaker>They are like the pegs and nails in a great building, which though they <v Speaker>are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep <v Speaker>the whole frame together. <v Speaker>It is an irony of Jewish history that the very conditions from which the Jews suffered <v Speaker>should prove to be a source of strength.

<v Speaker>Their dispersion had become a commercial network. <v Speaker>The financial skills they had been forced to learn in the Middle Ages were now needed <v Speaker>by capitalist Europe. <v Speaker>In the German states, Ruelas turned to Jewish merchants for assistance, <v Speaker>often putting the finances of state in the hands of their Jewish advisers. <v Speaker>It was from these early hall Fudan or Court Jews the better rows that <v Speaker>great families of European Jewry. <v Speaker>The Oppenheimer's, the virt timers and the Rothschilds <v Speaker>wealth, influence, prestige. <v Speaker>The rewards of the court were manifold for these Jews. <v Speaker>They lived in elegant surroundings, rode in carriages with large revenues, <v Speaker>and gave parties that even Christian nobles would attend. <v Speaker>But spiritually and intellectually, they remained part of Jewish society, <v Speaker>all but unaware of the changes that were transforming Western thought

<v Speaker>for Europe was entering an age that would be known as the Enlightenment. <v Speaker>Science had revolutionized the thinking of a generation with startling <v Speaker>discoveries in physics and chemistry and in mathematics. <v Speaker>The Enlightenment philosophers Voltaire who Locke you excited <v Speaker>an optimistic turned to examine human society with a reasoned techniques <v Speaker>of science. <v Speaker>They called for an end to all social oppression, an end to religious intolerance <v Speaker>and thinkis. <v Speaker>So why do I not disclose myself? <v Speaker>You're in 1754 in Germany. <v Speaker>A play was published that created a storm of controversy that's no. <v Speaker>I'm Judy. I am a jeweled. <v Speaker>I knew all day I knew the cows. <v Speaker>I met sulfite. The play was written by a Christian Enlightenment

<v Speaker>author got hold Lessing and his purpose was to show to his fellow Christians <v Speaker>that a Jew could be wise, sophisticated, really enlightened. <v Speaker>That's where the six are to allow different shifts and means the friendship <v Speaker>of a man, whoever he may be, has always been esteemed by <v Speaker>me. Shamim is. <v Speaker>Minus four firearms noone call me just for my name as Stone and Veeder to <v Speaker>me as ever. <v Speaker>Entine, you. <v Speaker>What happened is you are a Jew and have been bold enough to take an honest Christian <v Speaker>into your service. He had mere demons own you ought to have served <v Speaker>me, and that would have been right, according to the Bible near the Garnsey case. <v Speaker>Knight Politest the public was skeptical most Christians could <v Speaker>not imagine such a man coming from the isolated and traditional world of the German <v Speaker>Jew.

<v Speaker>When accused of having conceived the impossible, a cultivated Jew. <v Speaker>Lessing pointed to a young man he had just met, Moses Mendelssohn. <v Speaker>He really is a Jew. <v Speaker>A man who, without any guidance, has achieved a great strength in languages, in <v Speaker>mathematics, in philosophy, in poetry. <v Speaker>I regard him as a future honor to this nation. <v Speaker>Mendelsohn, the son of a poor Torah scribe, astounded Christian <v Speaker>Society by becoming one of the foremost Enlightenment thinkers of Germany. <v Speaker>His acceptance as an equal by enlightened Europeans was without precedent, <v Speaker>and it indicated a path that other Jews might follow adopt <v Speaker>the mores and constitution of the country in which you find yourself, <v Speaker>but be steadfast in upholding the religion of your fathers to <v Speaker>bear both burdens as well as you can. <v Speaker>He argued that only by opening their minds to non-Jewish knowledge could

<v Speaker>Jews leave the isolation of the ghetto. <v Speaker>It was the beginning of the Jewish enlightenment. <v Speaker>The husk are and those who embraced Muscala believed that <v Speaker>Western education was the way to a full and equal partnership with the Christians <v Speaker>of Europe. <v Speaker>We must remember that with all the talk of scientific rationalism and equality <v Speaker>and enlightenment, the experience of the Jews had been one of separation. <v Speaker>Separation had tried and preserve them. <v Speaker>It was the source of their vitality. <v Speaker>They had recently given birth to the Hasidic movement, which seemed to offer a way <v Speaker>of spiritual fulfillment within exile to give up their particular <v Speaker>identity by merging it with the lives of the society around <v Speaker>them. Seemed a frightening idea. <v Speaker>After all, the Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality were still only

<v Speaker>principles. And Christian Europe carried with it a dark heritage <v Speaker>of resentment towards the Jews. <v Speaker>It was not until the end of the 18th century that these Enlightenment ideals <v Speaker>were expressed in the politics of nations. <v Speaker>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men <v Speaker>are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain <v Speaker>unalienable rights. <v Speaker>The appetite for freedom that moved the American colonists now took hold <v Speaker>in Europe. <v Speaker>But all. <v Speaker>In France, where Jews had been virtually excluded for centuries, the <v Speaker>National Assembly issued a declaration on men <v Speaker>are born and remain free and equal in rights. <v Speaker>No person shall be molested for his opinions, even such as our religious.

<v Speaker>There was the sense of a world on the threshold of a new age. <v Speaker>The central political vision of the late 18th century was of a state <v Speaker>in which religious differences would count for little, in which citizens would be equal <v Speaker>before the law. <v Speaker>Somehow ethical and moral traditions, which had been born thousands of years before. <v Speaker>And visions of universal peace and social justice, which had been voiced by <v Speaker>the Hebrew prophets, had survived to be taken up again with a renewed <v Speaker>spirit and enthusiasm. <v Speaker>It seemed that at last, the time had come when the Jewish people could join in fellowship <v Speaker>with all others to work for the common good of humankind. <v Speaker>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H.

<v Speaker>Revson Foundation, Petree Stores Corp. <v Speaker>and the National Endowment for the Humanities. <v Speaker>Additional funding has been provided by the following contributors. <v Speaker>A complete donor list is available at W any T. <v Speaker>Abba Eban has written a companion book to this series, which is published by Summit <v Speaker>Books and is available in bookstores and libraries.