96 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



diaeval society rendered the same service to Christian virtue that 

 professional prostitutes do to female chastity. We have a strik- 

 ing illustration of this point of view in a decree issued in 1219, 

 by the German emperor Frederick III, permitting the Jews to 

 dwell in Nuremberg and to take a percentage for the use of 

 money. Inasmuch as this business, he said in justification of his 

 edict, is essential to the growth of commerce and the prosperity of 

 the city, it will be a lesser evil and wrong for Jews to practice 

 usury than for Christians, since the former are a stubborn and 

 stiffnecked race, and, if they persist in their perversity, as they 

 probably will do, are doomed to be damned anyhow.* 



The Hebrew, on the other hand, heartily reciprocated the 

 Christian's contumely, and could hardly conceal, under the pru- 

 dent disguise of mock humility, his disdain for the upstart Naza- 

 rene. He not only deemed it a religious duty to cheat him in 

 money matters, but thought it perfectly right to use him as an 

 agent in base or criminal transactions which a good Israelite 

 could not conscientiously perform. 



This mental and moral attitude, which even the modern He- 

 brew still maintains, is strikingly exemplified by the following 

 incident : Between 1820 and 1830 a band of burglars, numbering 

 over one hundred persons and consisting entirely of Jews, made 

 property so unsafe as to create a panic among the inhabitants of 

 the Prussian provinces of Posen and Brandenburg. The chief of 

 the band was a certain Loewenthal in Berlin, and all the members 

 of it were extremely devout attendants of the synagogue and 

 strict observers of every jot and tittle of the Levitical law. They 

 never broke into the houses of Jews and never stole on the Sab- 

 bath, since such an act would be a desecration of the sacred " day 

 of rest " ; but, rather than let an exceptionally favorable oppor- 

 tunity escape, they sometimes employed a so-called schdbbesgol 

 [schabbesgoi (Sabbath-Gentile) is a Jew-German term for the 

 Christian attendant or servant who does for an Israelite on the 

 Sabbath the things which his religion forbids him to do for 

 himself] to commit the crime for them, and, if necessary, did 

 not hesitate to have some one of their own number accompany 

 him on his burglarious expedition a couple of thousand yards 

 or so, the limits of a Sabbath day's journey. In case one of the 

 band was suspected of any particular offense and arrested, the 

 surest and speediest way of clearing himself was to prove an 

 alibi by the testimony of two witnesses, as the law required. 

 But the pious Hebrew regards perjury with peculiar abhorrence, 

 and fears above all things to take a false oath. Shylock was 



* [We have referred to this characteristic decree in The Popular Science Monthly for 

 December, 1891, p. 176, in illustration of another subject.] 



