General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1894 Original Publisher: The Jewish Publication Society of America Subjects: Jews History / Jewish History / Holocaust Religion / Judaism / General Social Science / Jewish Studies Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. THE INSTITUTION OF THE GHETTO. Every possible method to degrade and harass the Jews, and mark them off from the remainder of the population was invented and employed in the dark, mediaeval days. Decrees innumerable, regulating the life of the Jews and their intercourse with Christians, were passed at church council upon church council, and incorporated into the canon law, and often into civil legislation. Laws prohibiting them to hold offices, to eat or associate with Christians, to employ Christian nurses or servants, to appear on the streets during Passion Week, and many more of the same kind, were enacted time and again. But all such prohibitions, irritating and troublesome as they were, were yet naught compared with two regulations which only fiendish ingenuity could have invented to crush unfortunates whose only crime lay in the fact that the faith they confessed was a reproach to the claims of Christianity. One was the device hit upon by Pope Innocent III, decreed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and thereupon by every church council of that century convened anywhere in Europe – from Oxford in England, in 1222, to Buda in Hungary, in 1279 – compelling every Jew to wear on his clothes a mark, usually a piece of yellow cloth, by which he might be at once known as a Jew, From that I time on the Jew was a marked creature. The command was received by the unfortunates with a wail of despair resounding…
