Abraham's Children by Jon Entine

Author:Jon Entine
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: HIS022000
ISBN: 9780446408394
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-10-23T20:00:00+00:00

Sixteenth-century Europe was the respublica christeniana—the universal world of Christendom—dominated by the unyielding sword of the monarchies and under the thumb of a dogmatic papacy. Jews did not fare well. The pope initiated the Roman Inquisition, which was imposed throughout Italy and southern France. In western Europe after 1520, only scattered pockets of Jews remained, and the once-sizable Jewish communities of the German empire continued to shrivel until the end of the century. In the east, the feudal Polish and Lithuanian kingdoms allowed Ashkenazi Jews a measure of autonomy, but it was strictly circumscribed. By some estimates, by the early sixteenth century, the community of European Jews had shriveled to only tens of thousands.

Fleeing from persecution, their ancient religion on the verge of extinction, the People of the Book began turning prejudice to their advantage. Wherever they settled, they brought with them forms of communal organization. They developed their own language, the mélange of Slavic tongues, German, and Hebrew known as Yiddish that became the lingua franca of the wandering Jew. Segregated villages sprang up, ruled by Jewish religious leaders who staked their legitimacy on the Halakhah—the Jewish law interpreted by rabbis. Religion and education became the focus of everyday life.

The central themes of Ashkenazi Jewry—separatism and a devotion to religious literacy—played a profound role in the genetic makeup of Jews. “The more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out,” predicts Exodus 1:12. And that’s exactly what happened to the Jewish population. There is ample evidence in Ashkenazi history of periodic bottlenecks, when the Jewish population shrank, followed by fast growth: about fifty generations ago, around the ninth century, in the Rhine Valley, where Ashkenazi Jewry took root; in the twelfth century, when Jews expelled from southern and western Europe migrated eastward; and in the 1600s, after the Thirty Years’ War and the Chmielnicki Massacres that followed.

The most recent bottleneck occurred from 1648 to 1649. The Cossacks, the Orthodox Ukrainians, and the Polish peasantry violently revolted against Polish nobility and the Catholic nobles, but unleashed a special wrath against Jews, some of whom had acted as tax-collecting middlemen. The head of the Cossacks, Bohdan Chmielnicki, claimed that the Poles had sold Cossacks “into the hands of the accursed Jews,” a reference to the system of renting out serfs to mostly Jewish businessmen for three years at a time. Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred, with many more forced to relocate to the mostly barren territories to the east or to flee as far west as Alsace and Lorraine, leaving only a tiny Jewish population in Europe and worldwide Jewry at less than 1 million, its lowest point since biblical times.

Over the next century, the Jewish population gradually recovered, then began to grow exponentially. Most Ashkenazi Jews settled in the Ukraine or in Lithuania and Belarus, which were later annexed by imperial Russia. In 1791, Czar Catherine II (“the Great”) carved out the infamous Pale of Settlement, the huge region extending from the pale, or demarcation line,

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