Jewish-Christian Relations During the Renaissance

The Jews of Renaissance Europe were a people whose identity consisted of affiliation not to a particular nation, but rather, to a religion. As a result, they had no true homeland in Europe. They were, depending on where they lived, tolerated, welcomed, reviled, persecuted, driven out, or murdered en masse. The way Jews were treated in a given country would often change suddenly and drastically from time to time; a Jew was never safe or secure no matter where he was. Wherever a Jew went in Renaissance Europe, he was always reviled, hated, and persecuted by Christians. That said, there were some places where it was easier to be a Jew than others, and this more often than not depended on how useful a Jew was to Christians.

What made a Jew useful? The Jewish people of Europe were known, with good reason, to be exceptionally savvy merchants and traders, and to be good with money. This is in large part because such occupations were the only ones available to them; most cities and/or countries had laws expressly forbidding Jews from most professions. The stereotypical Jewish moneylender, epitomized by Shakespeare’s Shylock, was in that profession because Christians were forbidden to lend money and charge interest (which is not to say that many dyed-in-the-wool Christians didn’t do exactly that). Shakespeare’s Venice, as well as the actual one, was a mercantile nation/city. Commerce functions very badly without capital investment, and capital can’t be accumulated very easily without financing; very few would assume the risk of lending, however, if there were no compensation (interest) for that risk. Thus, a trading nation needed moneylenders. The Jews were not only willing to perform this task (lacking whatever scruples Christians may have had) but were expert at it. They also, in Venice and other commercial cities, were allowed to engage in trade. The “traveling Jews” of the Middle Ages had gone to the Middle East to trade when Christians had not been allowed to go there. As a result, they had expertise in and knowledge of the goods that came from that region, so Jewish merchants in Mediterranean trading cities often specialized in spices, silks, and other luxury goods.

Jewish specialization in trade, their willingness to lend money at interest, and their strange customs and religious practices all reinforced Christians’ impression of them as “the Others.” The titular “Merchant of Venice” is Antonio, not Shylock, and he spits on Shylock and reviles him. Antonio then hits up Shylock for a loan, while saying that even if granted the loan, he will continue to spit on him and curse him. In this exchange, Shakespeare underlines the fact that Christians hated and reviled the Jews but also did business with them. In Venice, the Jews were forced, as in many cities, to retreat into a walled compound at night and not emerge; policemen in gondolas patrolled the canals to make sure no Jew lingered outside the “geto” after sundown. That word became the modern “ghetto,” the word for any area of a city where an underclass lives and/or is relegated to. Shylock seems to accept this all with resignation and grace, until he bursts out:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,

organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same

food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,

heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter

and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If

you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the

rest, we will resemble you in that. (The Merchant of Venice, III. i. 56-68)

In other words, you live with us, you transact with us, so why do you treat us as if we weren’t human? Good question, actually. Yet, not only in the Renaissance but in many respects right up to the present day, Jews have been treated by Christians as aliens, barely tolerated in some places, hunted down and killed in others, and in places like Venice, allowed to participate in daily life to some extent but subject to onerous rules and always, having no say in those rules. Shylock, in Act IV, invokes the laws of Venice, but it soon becomes clear that those laws don’t really apply and that he can be legally defrauded of everything he owns.

It is interesting, though, to see if Shylock’s experience accurately reflects the actual experiences of Jewish merchants and moneylenders in Renaissance Venice. Certainly, since the Jews were useful (in fact, they were the oil that made the whole machine run), the authorities couldn’t have made their lives impossible; however, since the Jews were reviled and viewed as potentially dangerous aliens, they couldn’t have made their lives too comfortable, either. Another factor was the power of the Catholic Church. Christian mythology focuses on the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus. One reason given for hating the Jews was that “The Jews killed Jesus.” Of course, aside from the fact that no one can sensibly be held liable for what their ancestors may have done fifteen centuries ago, even a cursory reading of the Bible reveals that the Romans killed him. Yet, no one was advocating shutting up Italians (the people who could most be said to be descendants of the Romans) in ghettos. So this was a stupid rationale for hating the Jews, as stupid as reviling them for practicing a profession they had been forced into (moneylending with interest). But religious beliefs and practices often defy logic, especially if they are embedded. In determining just how good or bad the life of a Jew in Renaissance Venice really was, there is a text extant that details the life and experiences of a man who, in many ways, resembled the fictional Shylock.

In Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, the author presents an autobiographical account of what it was like to be a Jew and a businessman in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Venice. Much of the book focuses on how the author, though a rabbi, wasn’t a particularly orthodox Jew. He had a self-admitted gambling addiction, practiced many different professions, and challenged Jewish authority on issues such as the validity of the kabbalistic texts. It does seem, however, that he had a relatively large degree of freedom in Venetian society, given that he was a preacher, teacher, writer, bookseller, merchant and musician, among many other professions. His life had tragic elements in that two of his sons died during his lifetime and another became permanently estranged. Also, because of his gambling habits, he was broke more often than not. But while he was by no means a “typical” Jew, Judah’s life experience reflects that of the Jewish community at large. An interesting inference can be drawn from the following passage: “A horoscope was compiled for me by four astrologers, two Jews and two Christians, and two this day, on account of my sins, what they wrote has proved accurate” (Leon of Modena 111). This shows that not only was Judah a part of the community, but he considered himself to be; he consulted Christian as well as Jewish astrologers, and both accepted his business. Some of Leon of Modena’s sufferings were self-inflicted in that he hopped from profession to profession and constantly gambled; he was an unstable individual. However, it’s hard to become stable when you can’t put down roots; being “rootless” is part of the Jewish experience and is perhaps another reason why Christians despised Jews so much: rarely did they persist long enough in any one area to become an integral part of the culture, before some edict of expulsion was passed or, less officially, a wave of pogroms descended and life became unbearable. (A good example of how Jews did become an integral part of a community if they were allowed to live a stable life would be seen in 19th century Poland, Germany, and America.) Therefore, Jews were always aliens no matter where they were, and part of the human mindset is to divide everyone into ingroups and outgroups. The Jews were different enough and strange enough that they would always be considered by Christians to be outsiders at best and enemies at worst. For Leon of Modena, he was only in Venice in the first place because his family had been expelled from France. In fact, mass expulsions of Jews were a common occurrence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; the Jews never had any political power in Europe and were thus subject to the whims of the authorities and lived in a given area only on sufferance. They could be forced to leave at any time.

In many areas, however, Jews weren’t so much enemies or outsiders as total strangers. In Shakespeare’s England, virtually no one had ever seen a Jew, let alone talked to one: Jews had been expelled and forbidden to live in England since the twelfth century. Elizabethan audiences would have reacted to a Jewish character on stage about the same way as they would have to a Martian. It is interesting, then, that Shakespeare got so many of the details about Shylock right. His play was a satire of a money-obsessed society, but along the way, he makes a commentary on the unjust way Christians treated Jews, even in the relatively liberal society of Venice.

Injustice characterized Christian-Jewish relations in Europe throughout the Renaissance. The best a Jew could hope for was toleration; even if he had that, he had no civil rights and was hated by a large segment of the population. How tolerated Jews were depended mostly on how useful they were to the business community; even then, they could be chased out of the country at a moment’s notice. So the Christian attitude could be summed up as, “We hate you, but you can stay here (in your own walled-off area) as long as you’re useful. And even then, we have the right to rob and/or kill you should we feel the urge.” That Jews may have been tolerated more in some areas than others at a given time never changed that basic fact.

Works Cited

de Modène, Léon. The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah. Princeton University Press, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Washington DC: Folger Library, 1956.