Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/219

Rh were members, and from which they did not wish to be separated. The most learned and original of the older fathers, Origen, declared: "They are and remain our brothers; but they will only unite with us when we, by our faith and our life, have stirred them to emulate our example." Even Augustine frequently said: "In the hearts of Christians the confidence lives, and is expressed by them continually, that the children of the present Jewish generation will some day melt into one faith with the Christians." This view of the earliest Church disappeared, however, when Christianity became the state religion, and Roman heathenism en masse, with its hate and contempt for the Jews, became converted, in part freely and in part through direct or indirect compulsion, to Christianity. Soon the synods forbade eating with a Jew; and Ambrose, who, while still unbaptized, was elevated to the bishopric of Milan, styled the burning of a synagogue in Rome by the populace an act pleasing to God, and called the Emperor Maximus, who desired its rebuilding, derisively a—Jew. There comes to be, with infrequent exceptions, a more hostile strain in the writings of Christians, and the name of brother vanishes; their remaining without the Church is explained no longer by ignorance, but by an ill-meant obduracy on their part. The hope of a future reconciliation is, indeed, held; but the reconciliation is placed as it were in the most distant corner of the future, in the last days before the final catastrophe and the judgment of the world. It seemed as if the prospect of living in community with Israel (when, moreover, according to the Biblical doctrine, Israel would retake the ancestral primacy) was so little to the taste of the Christians that they were anxious to restrict so unwelcome and vexatious a condition to a few days or months.

The Christian emperors had changed nothing of importance in their laws respecting the rights and liberties of the Jews until the year 439, when Theodosius II excluded them from all public, even municipal, offices. This law passed over into Justinian's Codex, and regulated their status in Europe as well as in the Eastern Empire.

In the West we encounter at the end of the sixth century the first forced conversions in the Frankish Empire; Avitus, in Clermont, and the kings Chilperic and Dagobert set the precedent. It was followed in the kingdom of the Spanish Visigoths on a large scale. There, where the bishops ruled the state, King Sisibut in the year 612 allowed the Jews only the choice of emigrating or being baptized. Many chose the latter, but turned back after a time to Judaism; and, as the result, there began a series of violent measures to keep them in the Church against their will, and to avenge their lapsing. This was in accordance with a decree of the national synod of Toledo—a fatal decree, which has cost more blood and tears than any law of heathen antiquity, since it served as a norm for innumerable deeds in subsequent time.

In the Frankish Empire the ordinances of the Episcopal councils,