Jewish Literature and Other Essays Part 9

The wise would pray to leave this earth, If none their friendship sought.

Yet sad though loneliness may be, That friendship surely shun That feigns to love, and inwardly Betrays affections won."

The poem closes with a prayer for the king, who certainly could not have taken offense at Santob's frankness:

"May G.o.d preserve our lord and king With grace omnipotent, Remove from us each evil thing, And blessed peace augment.

The nations loyally allied Our empire to exalt, May G.o.d, in whom we all confide, From plague keep and a.s.sault.

If G.o.d will answer my request, Then will be paid his due-- Your n.o.ble father's last behest-- To Santob, Carrion's Jew."

Our troubadour's poetry shows that he was devotedly attached to his prince, enthusiastically loved his country, and was unfalteringly loyal to his faith; that he told the king honest, wholesome truths disguised in verse; that he took no pains to conceal his scorn of those who, with base servility, bowed to the ruling faith, and permitted its yoke to be put upon their necks; that he felt himself the peer of the high in rank, and the wealthy in the goods of this world; that he censured, with incisive criticism, the vices of his Spanish and his Jewish contemporaries--all of which is calculated to inspire us with admiration for the Jewish troubadour, whose manliness enabled him to meet his detractors boldly, as in the verses quoted above:

"Because beside a thorn it grows, The rose is not less fair; Though wine from gnarled branches flows, 'Tis sweet beyond compare.

A Jew true precepts doth apply, Are they therefore less good?"

History does not tell us whether Pedro rewarded the Jewish troubadour as the latter, if we may judge by the end of his poem, had expected. Our accounts of his life are meagre; even his fellow-believers do not make mention of him. We do know, however, that the poor poet's prayers for his sovereign, his pet.i.tions for the weal and the glory of his country were not granted. Pedro lost his life by violence, quarrels about the succession and civil wars convulsed the land, and weakened the royal power. Its decline marked the end of the peace and happiness of the Jew on Castilian soil.

As times grew worse, and persecutions of the Jews in Christian Spain became frequent, many forsook the faith of their fathers, to bask in the sunshine of the Church, who treated proselytes with distinguished favor.

The example of the first Jewish troubadour did not find imitators. Among the converts were many poets, notably Juan Alfonso de Baena, who, in the fifteenth century, collected the oldest troubadour poetry, including his own poems and satires, and the writings of the Jewish physician Don Moses Zarzal, into a _cancionera general_. Like many apostates, he sought to prove his devotion to the new faith by mocking at and reviling his former brethren. The attacked were not slow to answer in kind, and the Christian world of poets and bards joined the latter in deriding the neophytes. Spanish literature was not the loser by these combats, whose description belongs to general literary criticism. Lyric poetry, until then dry, serious, and solemn, was infused by the satirist with flashing wit and whimsical spirit, and throwing off its connection with the drama, developed into an independent species of poetry.

The last like the first of Spanish troubadours was a Jew,[44] Antonio di Montoro (Moro), _el ropero_ (the tailor), of Cordova, of whom a contemporary says,

"A man of repute and lofty fame; As poet, he puts many to shame; Anton di Montoro is his name."

The tailor-poet was exposed to attacks, too. A high and mighty Spanish _caballero_ addresses him as

"You Cohn, you cur, You miserable Jew, You wicked usurer."

It must be admitted that he parries these thrusts with weak, apologetic appeals, preserved in his _Respuestas_ (Rhymed Answers). He claims his high-born foe's sympathy by telling him that he has sons, grandchildren, a poor, old father, and a marriageable daughter. In extenuation of his cowardice it should be remembered that Antonio di Montoro lived during a reign of terror, under Ferdinand and Isabella, when his race and his faith were exposed to most frightful persecution. All the more noteworthy is it that he had the courage to address the queen in behalf of his faith. He laments plaintively that despite his sixty years he has not been able to eradicate all traces of his descent (_reato de su origen_), and turns his irony against himself:

"Ropero, so sad and so forlorn, Now thou feelest pain and scorn.

Until sixty years had flown, Thou couldst say to every one, 'Nothing wicked have I known.'

Christian convert hast thou turned, _Credo_ thou to say hast learned; Willing art now bold to view Plates of ham--no more askew.

Ma.s.s thou hearest, Church reverest, Genuflexions makest, Other alien customs takest.

Now thou, too, mayst persecute Those poor wretches, like a brute."

"Those poor wretches" were his brethren in faith in the fair Spanish land. With a jarring discord ends the history of the Jews in Spain. On the ninth of Ab, 1492, three hundred thousand Jews left the land to which they had given its first and its last troubadour. The irony of fate directed that at the selfsame time Christopher Columbus should embark for unknown lands, and eventually reach America, a new world, the refuge of all who suffer, wherein thought was destined to grow strong enough "to vanquish arrogance and injustice without recourse to arrogance and injustice"--a new ill.u.s.tration of the old verse: "Behold, he slumbereth not, and he sleepeth not--the keeper of Israel."

A great tournament at the court of the lords of Trimberg, the Franconian town on the Saale! From high battlements stream the pennons of the n.o.ble race, announcing rare festivities to all the country round. The mountain-side is astir with knights equipped with helmet, shield, and lance, and attended by pages and armor-bearers, minnesingers and minstrels. Yonder is Walther von der Vogelweide, engaged in earnest conversation with Wolfram von Eschenbach, Otto von Botenlaube, Hildebold von Schwanegau, and Reinmar von Brennenberg. In that group of notables, curiously enough, we discern a Jew, whose beautiful features reflect harmonious soul life.

"Susskind von Trimberg," they call him, and when the pleasure of the feast in the lordly hall of the castle is to be heightened by song and music, he too steps forth, with fearlessness and dignity, to sing of freedom of thought, to the prevalence of which in this company the despised Jew owed his admission to a circle of knights and poets:[45]

"O thought! free gift to humankind!

By thee both fools and wise are led, But who thy paths hath all defined, A man he is in heart and head.

With thee, his weakness being fled, He can both stone and steel command, Thy pinions bear him o'er the land.

O thought that swifter art than light, That mightier art than tempest's roar!

Didst thou not raise me in thy flight, What were my song, my minstrel lore, And what the gold from _Minne's_ store?

Beyond the heights an eagle vaunts, O bear me to the spirit's haunts!"

His song meets with the approval of the knights, who give generous encouragement to the minstrel. Raising his eyes to the proud, beautiful mistress of the castle, he again strikes his lyre and sings:

"Pure woman is to man a crown, For her he strives to win renown.

Did she not grace and animate, How mean and low the castle great!

By true companionship, the wife Makes blithe and free a man's whole life; Her light turns bright the darkest day.

Her praise and worth I'll sing alway."

The lady inclines her fair head in token of thanks, and the lord of castle Trimberg fills the golden goblet, and hands it, the mark of honor, to the poet, who drains it, and then modestly steps back into the circle of his compeers. Now we have leisure to examine the rare man.--

Rudiger Manesse, a town councillor of Zurich in the fourteenth century, raised a beautiful monument to bardic art in a ma.n.u.script work, executed at his order, containing the songs of one hundred and forty poets, living between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. Among the authors are kings, princes, n.o.blemen of high rank and low, burgher-poets, and the Jew Susskind von Trimberg. Each poet's productions are accompanied by ill.u.s.trations, not authentic portraits, but a series of vivid representations of scenes of knight-errantry. There are scenes of war and peace, of combats, the chase, and tourneys with games, songs, and dance. We see the storming of a castle of Love (_Minneburg_)--lovers fleeing, lovers separated, love triumphant. Heinrich von Veldeke reclines upon a bank of roses; Friedrich von Hausen is on board a boat; Walther von der Vogelweide sits musing on a wayside stone; Wolfram von Eschenbach stands armed, with visor closed, next to his caparisoned horse, as though about to mount. Among the portraits of the knights and bards is Susskind von Trimberg's. How does Rudiger Manesse represent him? As a long-bearded Jew, on his head a yellow, funnel-shaped hat, the badge of distinction decreed by Pope Innocent III. to be worn by Jews.

That is all! and save what we may infer from his six poems preserved by the history of literature, pretty much all, too, known of Susskind von Trimberg.

Was it the heedlessness of the compiler that a.s.sociated the Jew with this merry company, in which he was as much out of place as a Gothic spire on a synagogue? Susskind came by the privilege fairly. Throughout the middle ages the Jews of Germany were permeated with the culture of their native land, and were keenly concerned in the development of its poetry. A still more important circ.u.mstance is the spirit of tolerance and humanity that pervades Middle High German poetry. Wolfram von Eschenbach based his _Parzival_, the herald of "Nathan the Wise," on the idea of the brotherhood of man; Walther von der Vogelweide ranged Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans together as children of the one G.o.d; and Freidank, reflecting that G.o.d lets His sun shine on the confessors of all creeds, went so far as to repudiate the doctrine of the eternal d.a.m.nation of Jews. This trend of thought, characterizing both Jews and Christians, suffices to explain how, in Germany, and at the very time in which the teachers of the Church were reviling "the mad Jews, who ought to be hewn down like dogs," it was possible for a Jew to be a minnesinger, a minstrel among minstrels, and abundantly accounts for Susskind von Trimberg's a.s.sociation with knights and ladies. Susskind, then, doubtless journeyed with his brother-poets from castle to castle; yet our imagination would be leading us astray, were we to accept literally the words of the enthusiastic historian Graetz, and with him believe that "on vine-clad hills, seated in the circle of n.o.ble knights and fair dames, a beaker of wine at his side, his lyre in his hand, he sang his polished verses of love's joys and trials, love's hopes and fears, and then awaited the largesses that bought his daily bread."[46]

Susskind's poems are not at all like the joyous, rollicking songs his mates carolled forth; they are sad and serious, tender and chaste. Of love there is not a word. A minnesinger and a Jew--irreconcilable opposites! A minnesinger must be a knight wooing his lady-love, whose colors he wears at the tournaments, and for whose sake he undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Jew's minstrelsy is a lament for Zion.

In fact what is _Minne_--this service of love? Is it not at bottom the cult of the Virgin Mary? Is it not, in a subtle, mysterious way, a phase of Christianity itself? How could it have appealed to the Jew Susskind?

True, the Jews, too, have an ideal of love in the "Song of Songs": "Lo, thou art beautiful, my beloved!" it says, but our old sages took the beloved to be the Synagogue. Of this love Princess Sabbath is the ideal, and the pa.s.sion of the "Song of Songs" is separated from German _Minne_ by the great gap between the soul life of the Semite and that of the Christian German. Unbridled sensuousness surges through the songs rising to the chambers of n.o.ble ladies. Kabbalistic pa.s.sion glows in the mysterious love of the Jew. The German minstrel sings of love's sweetness and pain, of summer and its delights, of winter and its woes, now of joy and happiness, again of ill-starred fortunes. And what is the burden of the exiled Hebrew's song? Mysterious allusions, hidden in a tangle of highly polished, artificial, slow-moving rhymes, glorify, not a sweet womanly presence, but a fleeting vision, a shadow, whose elusive charms infatuated the poet in his dreams. Bright, joyous, blithe, unmeasured is the one; serious, gloomy, chaste, gentle, the other.

Yet, Susskind von Trimberg was at once a Jew and a minnesinger. Who can fathom a poet's soul? Who can follow his thoughts as they fly hither and thither, like the thread in a weaver's shuttle, fashioning themselves into a golden web? The minnesingers enlisted in love's cause, yet none the less in war and the defense of truth, and for the last Susskind von Trimberg did valiant service. The poems of his earliest period, the blithesome days of youth, have not survived. Those that we have bear the stamp of sorrow and trouble, the gifts of advanced years. With self-contemptuous bitterness, he bewails his sad lot:

"I seek and nothing find,-- That makes me sigh and sigh.

Lord Lackfood presses me, Of hunger sure I'll die; My wife, my child go supperless, My butler is Sir Meagreness."

Susskind von Trimberg's poems also breathe the spirit of Hebrew literature, and have drawn material from the legend world of the Haggada. For the praise of his faithful wife he borrows the words of Solomon, and the psalm-like rhythm of his best songs recalls the familiar strains of our evening-prayer:

"Almighty G.o.d! That shinest with the sun, That slumb'rest not when day grows into night!

Thou Source of all, of tranquil peace and joy!

Thou King of glory and majestic light!

Thou allgood Father! Golden rays of day And starry hosts thy praise to sing unite, Creator of heav'n and earth, Eternal One, That watchest ev'ry creature from Thy height!"

Like Santob, Susskind was poor; like him, he denounced the rich, was proud and generous. With intrepid candor, he taught knights the meaning of true n.o.bility--of the n.o.bility of soul transcending n.o.bility of birth--and of freedom of thought--freedom fettered by neither stone, nor steel, nor iron; and in the midst of their rioting and feasting, he ventured to put before them the solemn thought of death. His last production as a minnesinger was a prescription for a "virtue-electuary."

Then he went to dwell among his brethren, whom, indeed, he had not deserted in the pride of his youth:

"Why should I wander sadly, My harp within my hand, O'er mountain, hill, and valley?

What praise do I command?

Full well they know the singer Belongs to race accursed; Sweet _Minne_ doth no longer Reward me as at first.

Be silent, then, my lyre, We sing 'fore lords in vain.

I'll leave the minstrels' choir, And roam a Jew again.

My staff and hat I'll grasp, then, And on my breast full low, By Jewish custom olden My grizzled beard shall grow.