Jew Of Malta Quotes

I count religion but a childish toy And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

BARABAS: For religion Hides many mischiefs from suspicion.

BARABAS: Why, I esteem the injury far less, To take the lives of miserable men Than be the causers of their misery.

Infinite riches in a little room

I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

BARABAS: A reaching thought will search his deepest wits, And cast with cunning for the time to come; For evils are apt to happen every day.

BARABAS: Things past recovery Are hardly cur'd with exclamations. Be silent, daughter; sufferance breeds ease, And time may yield us an occasion, Which on the sudden cannot serve the turn.

For whilst I live, here lives my soul's sole hope, And when I die, here shall my spirit walk.

BARABAS: As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls. Sometimes I go about and poison wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns, That I may, walking in my gallery, See 'em go pinion'd along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practice first upon the Italian; There I enrich'd the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells. And, after that, was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems: Then, after that, was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I fill'd the gaols with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals; And every moon made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll How I with interest tormented him. But mark how I am blest for plaguing them: I have as much coin as will buy the town.

The chief predators were the Knights of St John, who turned their base in Malta into the last European centre of the slave-trade. They always had their eye on Jews and took them even from Christian ships on the grounds that they were Ottoman subjects. The knights kept their captives in a slave-barracks and sold them off periodically to speculators, who paid a price for Jews above the going rate; it was assumed all Jews were rich and would be ransomed.

St. Andrew of the Woods, Rome, Italy (1842) The next apparition took place in 1842 and was directly related to the first. Alphonse Tobie Ratisbonne was a twenty-eight-year-old Jewish man in the prime of his life who had just gotten engaged to marry. He was a lawyer from a wealthy family and was charming, good looking, and good humored. Prior to his wedding, he decided to spend the winter in Malta. At all costs, however, he wanted to avoid Rome because he hated Catholicism; the conversion and ordination of his brother Theodore had only fanned the flames of his already intense hatred of the Faith. But somehow, because of a delay with boats out of Naples and his own restlessness, Ratisbonne found himself in the Eternal City. With a few days to spend before his boat left for Malta, Ratisbonne caught up with some friends, including Baron Theodore de Bussières, who gave Ratisbonne a Miraculous Medal as a challenge to Ratisbonne’s fierce anti-Catholicism. The baron argued, “If it is just superstition, then it won’t harm you in the least to wear this or to read the memorare prayer.” Then on January 20, 1842, while waiting for the baron in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (“St. Andrew of the Woods”), Ratisbonne saw a vision of the Blessed Virgin. The brief vision of blinding beauty didn’t include an exchange of words, but by the end of it, Ratisbonne said he knew “all the secrets of divine pity.”3 He immediately converted to Catholicism, joined the priesthood, and moved to Israel with a ministry to convert the Jews. Ratisbonne’s conversion was so significant that even the pope heard of it and wanted to learn more about this “miraculous medal” and the nun who had it cast. The medal’s popularity swelled and Sister Catherine’s waned as she remained just another cloistered nun among many.