Tyrants don’t impose themselves. They are invited to. Here is how and why.
When the ferocious and formidable Mongols invaded Europe in 13th century CE, it left the Europeans completely stunned and baffled because the Mongols did not speak their language, nor did they seem to believe in anything that Europeans believed in, nor it looked like they worshipped any gods even remotely resembling the Christian conception of divinity. Confusion and mayhem were at unprecedented heights, for wherever the Mongols went, they wreaked extreme devastation with unyielding cruelty, and nothing to so much as slow their advances, let alone stop them. No wonder then that the Europeans were terrified to their bones, which bred all kinds of negative tales describing the attributes and intentions of the invading Mongols, portraying them as a villainous horde of barbaric marauders out to brutally and indiscriminately massacre and torture the Christian people. The Mongols were portrayed as the worst monsters to have walked the planet with bloodcurdling atrocities attributed to them, a lot of which they had not committed at all.
The Mongols felled bodies, and lots of them. They also burnt and destroyed villages after villages, and did not think twice about burning people with their houses if they did not move out in the time allowed for it. But they did just that. However, fear, anger and frustration makes people tell and readily believe gruesome stories, more imagined than real, about their oppressors, which is why fear-mongering is such a potent tool in the arsenal of any despot.
One such fear-monger was the English chronicler Matthew Paris, who, in his Chronica majora of 1241 CE, dreams up a deep conspiracy, according to which Jews were smuggling weapons to the Mongols, and had been caught doing so in Germany, where they were caught carrying casks to the Mongols, pretending to carry poisoned wine in them for the invaders. When the casks were opened, there was daggers and swords for the Mongols in them. There was no truth to any of it. Not even an iota of it.
Matthew Paris painted the Mongols and Jews as co-conspirators with hostile intent towards Latin Christendom, linking the terrifying, mysterious invaders to the already marginalized Jewish minority, which worked because there was already a great deal of resentment against the Jews among Christian Europeans. To galvanize Christians and thus unite them against Jews, Paris added fuel to the fire of antisemitic feelings popular at the time, towards which objective the Mongol invasions came in handy.
Soon enough, the Mongols and the Jews, who had nothing to do with each other, were seen as common enemy of Latin Christendom. And while Europeans soldiers and armies could not give any real fight to the formidable Mongols, people turned upon the Jews among them, resulting in a widespread persecution of Jewish minorities across Europe, particularly among the Germans, on account of fear and confusion caused by highly destructive Mongol invasion.
It should have been difficult to imagine, much less plausibly make, a connection between invading foreigners and resident Jews, but the preexisting hatred for and extreme prejudice against the Jews tided over the incredibility of the preposterous claims of the Jew-Mongol connections.
Jack Weatherford says in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern Worldi that Matthew Paris, who later became the lead purveyor of fantastical baloney about Jews being in cahoots with the Mongols, initially had his doubts about the idea that the Mongol invaders were exiled Jews returning home from Babylonian captivity, having been sealed off by a river that ran beyond Persia. A few chroniclers also claimed that the year 1241, which was the year of Mongol invasion, corresponded with year 5000 in the Jewish calendar, which was the year of the coming of the Jewish Messiah or a reappearance of King David, as per Jewish mythology. And so, there was some Jewish connection there. Matthew Paris, according to Weatherford, was unconvinced because Mongols did not speak Hebrew and did not seem to have any laws, which was in conflict with the biblical account of Moses receiving the law from God. Paris was objectively applying reason to the facts, but that he did only briefly.
He applied himself to the problem, and did not take long to find a way around the logical problem. They could still be the missing Hebrew tribe because “in the time of the government of Moses their rebellious hearts were perverted to an evil way of thinking, so that they followed after strange gods and unknown customs, so now in a more wonderful manner, owing to the vengeance of God, they were unknown to every nation, and their heart and language was confused, and their life changed to that of the cruel and irrational wild beast” (Weatherford, Genghis Khan, p. 156).
Oh, well, there goes reason out of the window in the service of wild prejudice. What’s reason when passions rules the head?
The point is, fear and hatred are a heady concoction that can lead anybody walk out of any reasoning, however compelling, by marshalling a senseless argument. And if one could bring God to the mix, even an ridiculous non-argument might sound deeply profound to the faithful. And faith thrives in tragedy and turmoil, which the 13th century Europe under the Mongol invasion had no dearth of.
The only thing that connected the Jews and the Mongols was that European Christians hated both, the former for a good enough reason whereas the latter for no reason at all. And yet, their hatred for the Mongols went away with the Mongols, but their hatred for the Jews remained. Because the Jews remained, was it?
…to be continued
i Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2004), 156.
