Judaism, religion of Jews. Judaism was based on divine authority, and the Hebrews had received it directly from the heavens; but it only lasted a limited time, and it had to make way, at least as far as ritual is concerned, for the law that Jesus Christ brought us.

Judaism used to be split into many factions, of which the main ones were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. See Pharisees, Sadducees, etc.

One finds in the books of Moses a comprehensive system of Judaism . Today, there are just two factions of Judaism ; that of the Karaites who shun all laws that are not those of Moses, and that of rabbis who also follow the traditions of the Talmud. See Karaite and Rabbi.

It is said that Judaism is of all religions the one that is hardest to abjure. In the eighteenth year of Edward I’s reign, Parliament accorded him a fifteenth of the kingdom’s resources to put him in a position to expel the Jews from the kingdom.

In the past, in England, the Jews and all the things that they possessed belonged to the lord on whose land they lived, and who had over them an empire so absolute that the lords could sell their Jews, who were unable to give themselves to another lord without his permission. Mathieu Paris says that Henry III sold Jews to his brother Richard for a year, so that the earl could gut those whom the king had already flayed: Quos rex excoriaverat, comes eviscerates.

They were distinguished from Christians both in life and in death, for they had their own judges before whom their cases were brought, and they bore a mark on their clothes in the shape of the Ten Commandments, that they could not remove outside the house without paying a fine. They were never buried within the land, but outside the walls of London.

Jews were often banished from France, then brought back. Under Philip the Fair in 1308, they were all arrested, exiled from the kingdom, and their belongings confiscated. Louis the Quarreler, his successor, brought the Jews back in 1320. Philip the Long drove them out once again, and burned many of them who were accused of having wanted to poison the wells and fountains. In the past, in Italy, France, and even in Rome, Jews who converted to the Christian faith had their belongings confiscated. In France, King Charles VI halted the confiscation, which up until that point had been done for two reasons: first, to test the faith of the new converts, it being only too common for those of this nation to pretend to submit to the Gospel for some worldly good, yet without internally changing their belief; second, because their wealth came for the most part from usury, the purity of Christian morals seemed to require that they do a general restitution of it, and that was done by confiscation. Mabillon, Vetera Analecta , Book III. [1]

Today Jews are tolerated in France, Germany, Poland, Holland, England, Rome, and Venice, thanks to the tributes they pay to the princes. They are also quite widespread in the Orient. But the Inquisition does not tolerate them in Spain or Portugal. See Jews.

Notes

1. Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), Vetera analecta; sive, Colectio veterum aliquot operum et opusculorum omnis beneris, carminum, epistolarum, diplomatum, apitaphiorum, etc. (Paris, 1723).