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Get thee gone, but do it.

Duke.

Gra.

[As Shylock is going, Gratiano seizes his left arm.

In christ'ning, thou shalt have two godfathers;
Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten more,
To bring thee to the gallows, not the font.

[Exit Shylock R. I. E

CURTAIN.

་་ ་་་་་ ་་་་

66

"TH

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

APPENDIX.

I. THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.

HE Helots of Sparta, the Pariahs of India, the Ghiaours of Turkey, the Negroes of America, have suffered less than the Jews in Christian Europe. This unhappy people have had to bewail their fate during centuries of prejudice, not extinguished even in our times, which renders the children responsible for the good or bad actions of their parents. In the eyes of Christian nations, this people was always the same populace who demanded of Pilate the murder of God in His mortality. Every Christian had against the Jew a personal grievance, and retained a feeling of enmity against him on account of the crime committed by Judas. The Israelite was thrust out from the pale of humanity; it was an act of piety to injure, molest, and ill-treat him. Different governments, far from checking the popular prejudice, encouraged and sanctioned it. From the year 615, the Council of Paris had declared the Jews to be incapable of performing any civil function; other Councils had forbidden them to work for Christians; royal edicts had interdicted them the right to possess landed property. Thus harassed by legislation, hunted away from trade, spurned from the paths of industry, excommunicated from the fields of labour, the Jew had to tax his ingenuity to be enabled to exist. He eluded by cunning that code that proposed to starve him; he converted all his property into ready money and traded in specie; he accumulated gold, monopolized the sale of it, and obtained whatever price he asked for it- he became an usurer. This degrading commerce, to which the Christian had forcibly reduced him, was used by him against the Christian, and the overflowings of the cup of his despair were employed as the instrument of his revenge. The Christian had forbidden him to obtain an honest livelihood; he made, at the expense of the Christian, an inordinate and unjust profit. The Christian would ruin him; he enriched himself by the ruin of the Christian.

"But this very success was fatal to the Israelites. The opulence of the infidels excited the cupidity of the faithful. Was a Catholic lord, prince,

or baron embarrassed in his finance, without having recourse to the form of any legal process, he seized some moneyed man from the tribe, and exacted money from him by torture. Thus, in the year 1210, John, King of England borrowed ten thousand marks of a Hebrew, in Bristol, by causing ten of his teeth to be extracted. The Jew was as a princely and fertile farm that was well cultivated by the despot. According to Matthew Paris, this same John, being in want of ready money, lent on hire for several years, to his brother Richard, all the Jews on his estates, ut quos rex excoriaverat, comes evisceraret, so that, after being fleeced by the king, they should be stripped of what was left them by the earl; it was but a circumstance of the most trifling nature. In 1262, the lords revolted against Henry III., and only obtained the support of the people by promising them the pillage of the Jewish quarter in London. Three hundred houses were sacked, and seven hundred persons, men, women and children, were assassinated. The triumphant populace exercised during that year sovereign rights. France was not less tender to the Jews than England. In order to prevent their escaping confiscation by abjuration, St. Louis caused the Synod of Melun to confirm the edict which confiscated to the benefit of the seigneur the property of every converted Israelite. At the same time, with atrocious contradiction, the pious king permitted, in Paris and the provinces, the massacre of all the Israelites who refused to be converted. In Brie, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, and Maine, two thousand five hundred Jews were massacred. This took place during the Easter week of the year of grace 1238—that is to say, if I am not mistaken, three hundred and thirty-four years before Saint Bartholomew. One thus sees that it is not only by date that Louis IX. is a predecessor of Charles IX. The Valois caused the Jews to be the victims of a skilful process of periodical depredation; every now and then they were exiled to be plundered, and then were recalled to be robbed. The Catholic kings turned the reprobates to account as ingeniously as the very Christian kings. They were dispossessed of their property, then allowed again to enrich themselves, to be again despoiled. The upright Torquemada put an end to this sanguinary system: he demanded of Ferdinand the perpetual banishment of all the Jews who had not abjured their faith at the expiration of four months. The Jews, informed of this, offered the king thirty thousand ducats for his consent to allow them to remain. Ferdinand hesitated to sign the decree, when the monk entered, crucifix in hand, exclaiming: 'Judas Iscariot sold his God for thirty deniers; you—you would sell him for thirty thousand!' The king signed, and according to Mariana's calculation, eight hundred thousand Hebrews were expatriated. What became of them? Seek for

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